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Níl ann ach cumadh,
it is just a made-up story. (Ó Dónaill,
Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, Irish-English Dictionary,
353)
If it were a very long made-up
story, one would say in Irish: níl ann ach buanchumadh,
it is just a "long, endless tale." A similar Irish
compound, buanchuimhneach, means "(someone) having a long
memory."
The Irish and Scots-Gaelic word bunkum (buanchumadh) is derived
by all Anglo-American dictionaries from a shaggy-dog tale. As
the story goes, during the 16th American Congress, a long-winded
congressman from Buncombe County, North Carolina, spoke endlessly
on a particular bill, while other members impatiently waited
to vote. From then on, as the etymological bunkum goes, to talk
"bunkum" meant to speak as endlessly as that long-forgotten
politician from Buncombe County. (See: Bartlett, American
Dictionary.)
Ironically the old congressman
from Buncombe County may have been speaking Gaelic buanchumadh
(pron. buan'cumah, a long made-up story)after
all.North Carolina had an historic Scots-Gaelic and Irish-speaking
population up until the beginning of the 20th century. The jazz
musician Dizzy Gillespie's family were African-American Gaelic
speakers from North Carolina and Alabama. So Buncombe County
may have been the origin of bunkumas buanchumadh,
(pron. buan-cumah, "a shaggy dog tale") after
all.
"Under an enormous image
of (Dizzy) Gillespie beamed on to a wall at Sprague (Hall), Yale
music professor Willie Ruff salutes his old friend and explains
to the audience how this musical journey began. "Dizzy used
to tell me tales of how the blacks near his home in Alabama and
in the Carolinas had once spoken exclusively in Scots Gaelic.
He spoke of his love for Scotland....." (The Scotsman
newspaper, Sept. 25, 2005. http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1984012005
African-American Scots-Gaelic
and Irish speakers were not limited to the American South. The
Irish and Gaelic languages are hidden strands of both African-
and Irish- American Vernacular. Ya' tuig (pron.
dig, understand, comprehend)? Tuig é nó ná,
(pron. dig ay no naa, understand it or not), according
to both enumerations of the 1870 U.S. Federal census, 12% of
the African-American community in New York City was Irish-African-American.
Despite all the academic "whiteness"
bunkum today, at the dawning of the Gilded Age, in just
a single New York City ward, there were hundreds of Irish-African-American
families crammed together in the tenements and rookeries of Laurens
(W. Broadway), Thompson, Sullivan, and Spring streets, in what
is the swank (somhaoineach, pron. su'wainek,
wealthy) neighborhood of Soho in 2006.
In America the word bunkum
has been slowly replaced by the abbreviated "bunk."
But in modern Ireland, the word bunkum is still popular,
as demonstrated by the headline of this recent column by the
Irish journalist Jude Collins in the Daily Ireland newspaper.
Enough 'one-side-is-as- bad-as-the-other'
bunkum by Jude Collins
Is there a comparable record
of repeated and murderous Catholic attacks on Protestant people
and Protestant property in the Ballymena area in recent years?
If there is, it's been oddly under-reported... The fact that
this both-sides bunkum is offered by the great and the
good, and the media, under the guise of balance and fairness,
makes it all the more sickening. (Daily Ireland, 11/05/2006,
front page.)
"Pearl (stiffly): De old
Irish bunk, huh?" (O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh,
636)
"Yank: You're de bunk.
Yuh ain't got no noive, get me? Yuh're yellow, dat's what."
(O'Neill, The Hairy Ape, 636)
"Belle (angrily): Aw,
can it! Give us a rest from that bunk!" (O'Neill,
Ah Wilderness, 73)
Let's hope we can put to rest
the bunk about bunkum. Though shaggy-dog tales (like academic
bunkum) have more lives than a cat.
Daniel Cassidy is founder and co-director of An Léann
Éireannach, the Irish Studies Program, at New College
of California in San Francisco. Cassidy is an award-winning filmmaker
and musician. His research on the Irish language influence on
American vernacular and slang has been published in the New
York Observer ("Decoding the Gangs of New York"),
Ireland's Hot Press magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle,
and Lá, the Irish-language newspaper.
His book, The Secret Language
of the Crossroad: How the Irish Invented Slang, will be published
by CounterPunch Books in Spring 2007. Cassidy was born in Brooklyn
and lives with his wife Clare in San Francisco. He can be reached
at DanCas1@aol.com
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