The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (24 page)

Felix Walker replied that he was not speaking to Congress, his speech was for the benefit of his constituency back home: he was making ‘a speech for Buncombe’.

You see, Felix Walker didn’t care about the Missouri Question or the Missouri Compromise: he cared about the press coverage he would get among the voters in his own constituency. It was such an ingenious idea (and such a common practice in all democracies) that the phrase caught on, and
speaking to Buncombe
soon got shortened to
speaking bunkum
and then just plain
bunkum
, which needs to be
debunked
.

It’s worthwhile mentioning that though that’s the usual story, there’s an alternative version in which a Congressman wandered in and found Felix Walker addressing an utterly empty chamber. He asked Walker what the hell he was doing and Walker explained that he was speaking to Buncombe (no doubt a copy of the speech would be mailed home). I prefer this version, but it’s less likely to be true. Either way,
bunkum
remains talk that serves no actual purpose, and is definitely down to the place in North Carolina.

Poor Buncombe County! Consigned to the dictionary as a byword for nonsense, Edward Buncombe must be turning in his grave.

Edward Buncombe was a British chap who was born in St Kitt’s but moved to America when he inherited a great big plantation in Carolina. He was one of the first fellows in the area to join the pro-independence movement, and when the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775 he joined the Continental Army and was wounded at the Battle of Germantown. He would probably have recovered were it not that one night he got out of bed and sleepwalked to the top of a flight of stairs, toppled down, and died from his re-opened wounds.

In his will he left over two thousand acres of plantation, and ten negroes. He was such a hero that a few years later Buncombe County was named in his honour. So really it’s Edward Buncombe whose name is in
debunked
. Or you can go further.

Edward Buncombe must, somehow or other, have been a descendant of Richard de Bounecombe who lived in Somerset in the early fourteenth century. Bounecombe itself means
reedy
(
boune
)
valley
(
combe
).
Combe
is one of the very few words in Old English that comes from Celtic. Why there are so few is a great mystery, and it all depends on how nasty the Anglo-Saxons were.

The Anglo-Saxon Mystery

Once upon a time, two thousand years ago, the British Isles were inhabited by Celts, who, as you might expect, spoke Celtic languages. They also had tattoos. The ancient Greeks called the inhabitants of these foggy islands
Prittanoi
(from where we get the name Britain), meaning
tattooed people
, although this may just have been down to the Celtic habit of painting themselves with woad, which the Greeks thought rather odd.

The important thing for the moment is that Boadicea (died 61 AD) wasn’t
English
, even though she lived in what is now England. England didn’t exist at the time. Boadicea was a Celtic Briton.

England started to exist only when the Angles began arriving from Denmark in about 400 AD. They referred to their new country as
Angle-land
or
England
. Along with the Angles came the Saxons (from Saxony) and the Jutes (from Jutland) and between them they started to speak Old English.

Soon they had kings and one of these was called Alfred the Great, who was originally the King of the West Saxons but decided to call himself
Rex Angul-Saxonum
, or
King of the Anglo-Saxons
.

So what happened to the Celts? What happened to all the people who had swanned around the island before, covered in woad?

The answer is that nobody’s quite sure. There are two arguments: the linguistic one and the historical one.

Whenever one bunch of people conquers another, they pick up a bit of the conquered people’s language. You can’t help it. Try as you might, the native language is all around you. You may have enslaved the natives, but you still need to be able to order your slaves around. You may not want to learn the language, but there are always new things in a new country that you don’t have any words of your own to describe.

Take the example of the British in India. The Brits were there only for a couple of hundred years and yet in that time they picked up
shampoo
,
bungalow
,
juggernaut
,
mongoose
,
khaki
,
chutney
,
bangle
,
cushy
,
pundit
,
bandana
,
dinghy
etc., etc., etc. And those were only the words that they brought home with them.

So what words did the Angles and Saxons pick up from the Celts?

Next to nothing.

There’s
combe
, meaning
valley
, which comes from
cym
. There’s
tor
, meaning
rock
, which comes from
torr
, the Celtic word for
hill
. There’s
cross
, which we seem to have got from Irish missionaries in the tenth century, rather than from the native Celts. And there’s …

Well, there’s not much else. It depends on how you count things, really, and it’s always possible that words were there but not noted down. The Anglo-Saxons managed to occupy an island for hundreds of years and take almost no words from the people they defeated.

In fact, linguistically, this doesn’t look like an occupation, it looks like a massacre. On the surface it would appear to be a pretty crazy massacre as well. Of course, massacres are always pretty bad things, but you’d still expect a
few
more words to have crept into Old English, even if they were only the words for
ouch
,
no
and
stop it
. In English there’s a terrifying absence.

And the historians say that this is absolute hogwash. Where, they ask quite reasonably, are the bodies? There aren’t any. No mass graves, no accounts of epic battles. No slaughter recorded. Nothing archaeological. Zero. Zilch. Nil.

So where linguists see a slaughter, archaeologists see peaceful co-existence. It’s all rather odd. Although there’s a third possibility, which is illustrated by a hill in Herefordshire called Pensax, and a town in Essex called Saffron Walden.

Pensax means
hill
(
pen
)
of the Saxons
, and very importantly the
pen
there is a Celtic word. So it would seem that, for a while at least, there were Saxons on the hill and Celts down in the valley. The same goes for the charmingly named Dorset village of Sixpenny Handley.
Sixpenny
is a corruption of
Sex Pen
and is just Pensax with the elements swapped around.

Meanwhile, Saffron Walden is obviously a place where they grew saffron, but the
Walden
is odd. It’s an Anglo-Saxon term meaning, literally,
valley of the foreigners
, but
wealh
was a word that was always used to refer to Celts (and, indeed, it gave us the name
Wales
).

So, if you work from the place-name evidence you get a third and very odd picture of a country filled with settlements of Anglo-Saxons and Celts living side by side, but
never
talking. That would mean that they weren’t trading, weren’t marrying, weren’t doing anything at all except naming each other’s settlements, presumably as places to avoid.

You might theorise that each people understood the other’s language and merely chose to speak their own pure dialect, but it would appear that this wasn’t the case. Again it comes down to place-names.

As we have seen,
pen
was a Celtic word for
hill
. Yet when the Old English came across a hill called
Pen
, they decided to name it
Pen hul
,
hul
being the Old English word for
hill
.

The same process was repeated all across England. Names were doubled up, such as
Bredon
(
hill hill
) or the
River Esk
(
river river
). This would seem to point to a linguistic exchange that didn’t go much further than finding out a place-name before driving out anybody who knew what the place-name meant.

It also makes for some very amusing etymologies.
Penhul
became
Pendle
and then a few hundred years later somebody again noticed that it was a hill and changed the name to
Pendle Hill
, which means
Hill-Hill Hill
. This was not a one-off. Bredon Hill in Worcestershire is also
Hill-Hill Hill
on exactly the same pattern of Celtic (
bre
), Old English (
don
) and modern English (
hill
).

We will never know how the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts really got on. Maybe it was a massacre, maybe it was a jolly party. The ages were too dark and history is too forgetful. Nor is it wise to be consumed by sorrow or anger. If you look back far enough everything is stolen and every country invaded. The Celts themselves had conquered the previous people of Britain in around 600 BC, and the Anglo-Saxons were about to get hit by the vicious Vikings, who would bring with them their own language and their own place-names. For example, one Viking found a sedge-covered stream in Yorkshire and decided to name it
Sedge-Stream
, thus spawning one of the world’s largest corporations.

The Sedge-strewn Stream and Globalisation

The Vikings were horrid people to whom history has, for some strange reason, been very indulgent. Whether it was the rape, the killing or the human sacrifice that you objected to, it was probably a bad thing when the Vikings arrived at Lindisfarne in 793 and then began to work their way down the north-east coast of England. They quickly got to Yorkshire, and near what is now Harrogate one of them found a sedge-strewn stream and decided to name it
Sedge-Stream
. Except of course he didn’t call it that because
Sedge-Stream
would be English; he called it
Sedge-Stream
in Old Norse, and the Old Norse for
Sedge-Stream
is
Starbeck
.

Starbeck is now a little suburb on the eastern edge of Harrogate. The stream is still there, although there’s no discernible sedge and it runs quite a bit of its way underground in a pipe next to the railway tracks. The place-name is first recorded in 1817, but, as we’ve seen, it must go back to the Vikings, and we also know that there were people there in the fourteenth century.

These people had sex (as people almost invariably do) and produced a family. The family were named for the place where they lived, almost. One vowel was changed. The Starbuck family are first recorded living in just the right area in 1379. Since then two things have happened: the Quaker movement was founded and America was discovered.

The result of this double catastrophe was that among the first settlers of Nantucket Island near Cape Cod was a Quaker family whose name was Starbuck. Exactly how much they quaked is not recorded, but they did become big players in Nantucket’s biggest trade: whaling.

The Starbuck family took up their harpoons with a vengeance. They were soon the most famous whalers in Nantucket if not the world. In 1823 Valentine Starbuck was chartered by the King and Queen of Hawaii to take them on a trip to England, where the unfortunate royal pair died of measles. Obed Starbuck discovered Starbuck Island in the Pacific and named it in honour of his cousin.
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