Made In America - Bill Bryson [184]
A few colleges and high schools have changed their team nicknames from Mohawks or Hurons to something more innocuous and less emotive, and one newspaper, The Oregonian of Portland, announced in 1992 that it would no longer publish Indian-related nicknames, explaining that they tended to ‘perpetuate stereotypes that damage the dignity and self-respect of many people in our society’.43
At the time of writing, however, no professional team was seriously contemplating a name change.
17
Of Bombs and Bunkum: Politics and War
I
When, in about 1820, a Congressman named Felix Walker was accused of speaking drivel – which, evidently, he was – he replied that he was speaking to the people of Buncombe County, North Carolina, his district. Almost immediately his congressional colleagues began referring to any political claptrap as speaking to Buncombe. Soon the phrase had spread beyond Washington and was being abbreviated to buncombe, often re-spelled bunkum, and eventually was further contracted to bunk. Debunk, a back-formation, came later still, in 1927. Bunkum in turn begat hokum – a blend of hocus and bunkum. Thus with a single fatuous utterance the forgotten Felix Walker managed to inspire half a page of dictionary entries.1 In doing so, Walker touched on a central paradox of American political rhetoric – namely, that while politicians may mostly spout hot air (in its metaphorical sense an Americanism of the 1840s), they also constantly refresh the language.
A few American political terms have considerable venerability. Caucus, from an Algonquian word for counsellor, dates from the early seventeenth century, and as such is one of the oldest of surviving Americanisms. Mugwump (at first often spelled mugquomp), another Algonquianism, followed soon after, making its first recorded appearance in 1643. For two hundred years it retained its original sense of a chief or leader before abruptly shifting in the 1880s to describe a political maverick. (The oft quoted definition is that a mugwump is someone who sits with his mug on one side of the fence and his wump on the other.) Favourite son was first used of Washington as far back as 1789 and administration was coined by him soon after.
But the golden age of American political terminology was the nineteenth century. Of the perhaps two hundred terms that gained some measure of currency in that tumultuous century, a good number were sufficiently useful to be still with us today, among them spoils system, lobbyist, split ticket, party ticket, dyed-in-the-wool, office seeker, dark horse, lame duck, slate, standard-bearer, gag rule, straw vote, party machine, filibuster, slush fund, gubernatorial, junket in the sense of a trip at government expense, bandwagon in the sense of a movement or fashion to climb aboard, landslide for a victory, to dodge the issue, to electioneer, to campaign, to gerrymander, to be in cahoots with, to logroll, to stump, to run, to muckrake, to mend fences, to whitewash, and to keep the ball rolling (so said because in the 1840 presidential campaign a ten-foot leather ball bearing that slogan was rolled from town to town in support of William Henry Harrison).2
One of the first of these terms to enter common parlance was gerrymander. Meaning to redraw electoral boundaries to favour a particular party, it dates from 1812 and was named for Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry (shortly to become Vice-President under James Madison), whose Jeffersonian party engaged in some audacious cartographic manipulations to preserve its grip on the state assembly. Noticing that one district in Essex County had a vaguely reptilian shape, the artist Gilbert Stuart sketched on a head and legs and called it a salamander. ‘No, a gerrymander!’ cried an onlooker, and the term stuck. A small, overlooked aspect of the term is that we all mispronounce it. Gerry spoke his name with the hard g of Gertrude rather than the soft g of Gerald.3
In the following decade two other durable