Prefixing Precision

One of the bloggers at Patheos reprinted a list from Dictionary.com of words which are technically made up of a root word and a prefix or a suffix. But in reality, either the root word is meaningless or we don't use it anymore.

A couple I recognized. Impeccable, for one, has the Latin root peccare, and someone in my line of work has once or twice run across the tidbit that this is the word we translate as "sin." Peccadillos, or "little sins," also comes from this root. When we use "impeccable," we usually intend to suggest that something has a status beyond question or is faultless. Impeccable manners are manners without flaw. Impeccable honesty is honesty that no one questions.

I had not realized that "debunk" was never really a prefix-root construction so much as a new made-up word from the 1920s. It was meant to describe the process of taking the "bunk" or false information, out of something.

"Bunk" in this meaning is a shortened form of the word "bunkum." That word came into English usage thanks to North Carolina Congressman Felix Walker, who during the 16th Congress rose to speak on the issue of admitting Missouri to the United States. Rep. Walker timed his speech after the house had spent many long and exhausting hours negotiating how Missouri was to enter the union -- as a state that allowed slavery or as one that prohibited it.

Although he had nothing substantive to add to the debate -- a common but interesting ailment in that politicians catch it but their constituents are the ones who suffer -- Rep. Walker insisted on delivering his remarks anyway, saying he had to speak on behalf of Buncombe County, his district. His fellow representatives shouted him down so he could not deliver his speech, which he had to have printed in a newspaper. But his constant reference to his district of Buncombe County became first a Washington metaphor describing meaningless talk meant to satisfy constituents or make the speaker look good and then a commonly-used phrase for the same thing.

Rep. Walker thus became famous not for what he said, but for the fact that he insisted on trying to say it even though it was meaningless and no one wanted to hear it. Today, of course, Congress operates much differently.