2 min
When Name-Calling Gets Personal
It’s quite common to meet people named after things: Lily, Grace, Forrest, Hunter, and so on. Every once in a while, though, English speakers flip the script and name things after people. In this Word Stories instalment, we take a closer look at some nouns and verbs that started out as names.
mentor
Mentōr is a character in Homer’s Odyssey who served as an advisor to King Ulysses. He was charged with the education of the king’s son Telemachus, and the goddess Athena took on his likeness to give Telemachus a lifetime’s worth of sound advice. François Fénelon’s novel The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses (1699) retold the story in a way that cemented the association of the name Mentor with good advice, and in the following century mentor appears in print as a French noun meaning “advisor”. The name Mentor (capitalized) is first attested in English meaning “advisor” in the 18th century, and the uncapitalized noun mentor follows in the 19th. In the 20th century, the noun gave rise to the verb to mentor (i.e. to guide and advise) and thereby the new noun mentee (i.e. the person receiving the guidance).
boycott
The verb and the noun boycott come from the surname of Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832–1897), the agent of the Anglo-Irish absentee landlord Lord Erne in County Mayo. After a particularly poor harvest around 1880, tenant farmers asked for a 25 percent reduction in rent; Lord Erne (via Boycott) offered 10 percent and refused to negotiate. After Boycott began evicting tenants, local activists decided to stop offering their work and services to him and to anyone who took over the farms of the evicted tenants. Eventually Boycott was forced to pay Protestant militiamen (under heavy, expensive police protection) from another area to come in and harvest his crops, leading to a significant economic loss. The tenant farmers’ campaign became famous at the time for being innovative, non-violent and highly effective, leading to the rapid popularization of the term boycott for similar tactics.
bunkum, bunk
Bunkum, meaning “useless or incorrect speech or information”, has its origins in a somewhat fitting place: the United States Congress. It was originally spelled Buncombe, after Buncombe County, North Carolina, and came about thanks to a congressman from the area named Felix Walker. In 1820, just before a highly important vote that his colleagues were eager to hold, Walker rose to deliver what his fellow members deemed an irrelevant and meaningless speech, so much so that they shouted him down before he had the chance to finish. Walker claimed that he was, in fact, speaking not to Congress but “to Buncombe”. In other words, his speech was for the sole benefit of his constituents and unrelated to the business at hand.
The expression to speak to Buncombe quickly became popular in US government circles. By the 1830s, politicians engaging in such empty speech (as much a common practice in Washington then as now) were frequently said to be “speaking to Buncombe”. As a standalone noun, Buncombe was first recorded in the early 1850s and was often spelled Bunkum from its inception.
Bunkum, often shortened to bunk, spread well beyond the political sphere and came to describe meaningless information or speech of any kind. It perhaps reached the height of popularity when industrialist Henry Ford famously proclaimed in 1916 that “History is more or less bunk.” With so much bunk around, it is little wonder that people started getting debunked. First attested in the 1920s, debunk is a simple addition of the prefix de- to bunk, giving it the literal meaning “to remove the bunk”. Nowadays, debunk has surpassed its predecessor to such an extent that the straightforward link between bunk and debunk is not widely known.
