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Buncombe   Listen
noun
Bunkum, Buncombe  n.  Speech-making for the gratification of constituents, or to gain public applause; flattering talk for a selfish purpose; anything said for mere show. (Cant or Slang, U.S.) "All that flourish about right of search was bunkum all that brag about hanging your Canada sheriff was bunkum... slavery speeches are all bunkum."
To speak for Buncombe, to speak for mere show, or popularly. Note: "The phrase originated near the close of the debate on the famous 'Missouri Question,' in the 16th Congress. It was then used by Felix Walker a naïve old mountaineer, who resided at Waynesville, in Haywood, the most western country of North Carolina, near the border of the adjacent county of Buncombe, which formed part of his district. The old man rose to speak, while the house was impatiently calling for the 'Question,' and several members gathered round him, begging him to desist. He persevered, however, for a while, declaring that the people of his district expected it, and that he was bound to 'make a speech for Buncombe.'"






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Buncombe" Quotes from Famous Books



... longer about keeping aloof. If Cecil Spring Rice would tell you the complaints he has already presented and if you saw the work that goes on here—more than in all the other posts in Europe—you'd see that all the old talk about keeping aloof is Missouri buncombe. We're very much ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... cold winter of 1865 in the trenches in front of Petersburg tired out his patience and he got powerful hungry. He stood six feet three inches and his fighting weight was 205 pounds. When we surrendered together, on the 25th of March, 1865, in front of Petersburg, Buncombe thought it good policy to make friends with his captors, in the hope of getting more and better rations; so he said, "Yes, I've quit fighting you. I've been wanting to quit for some time, and I shore ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott

... Recollections, 1826, and his Geography and History of the Mississippi Valley, 1827. It was not an age of great books, but it was an age of large ideas and expanding prospects. The new consciousness of empire uttered itself hastily, crudely, ran into buncombe, "spread-eagleism," and other noisy forms of patriotic exultation; but it was thoroughly democratic and American. Though literature—or at least the best literature of the time—was not yet emancipated from ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... Warfare;' but he can't 'talk Indian'—that is very clear. The 'abrogynes' are not in the habit of making interminable speeches: they leave that to white members of Congress, who pump up a feeling in a day's speech 'for Buncombe.' Do you remember what HALLECK ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various

... fallen in with, and once at a strikers' meeting he had heard rich people denounced with the same frenzy. He had made his own reflections upon the tastelessness of the rhetoric, and the obvious buncombe of the motive, and he had not ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells



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