Bunkum

Bunkum is a noun that refers to nonsense. Our word of the day came to life after a mid-19th century speech that referred to a county in North Carolina called Buncombe. The speech was apparently made solely to please a politician’s constituents, so the word stuck and was later changed to its current form. Example: We all got a feeling that the governor’s speech was bunkum when he started trotting out dubious numbers. But things got even more questionable when he made up names to support those bogus facts.