Tag Archive: NC


Bunk or Buncombe?

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Brian Hart)

I was visiting Atlanta to do a panel discussion on education vs. debunking.  Prior to the panel, I started thinking about the word bunk and debunk and decided to find their original meanings.  A few minutes of Internet research told me that the word was derived from a region in North Carolina called Buncombe County.  A representative from that county in the 1820s named Felix Walker was known to ramble on with long and wearisome speeches for Buncombe.  In Washington, D.C.  the term, “you are full of Buncombe” became a common phrase.  Over the years the spelling changed to bunkum and the meaning morphed into “any kind of nonsense.”  I was able to bring this origin and meaning into the panel discussion that day.

Two days later, my wife and I drove to see her cousins in Asheville, North Carolina.  We arrived in the evening, and when I was talking about my panel and recounting the origin of Bunkum to the cousins, they all laughed and said, “Asheville is the seat of Buncombe County!”  The next day we walked over and took pictures of the courthouse, where the words  “Buncombe County Court House” are written in stone.

Brian Hart in front of the Bumcombe County Courthouse

Stranger from the Same Land

(Submitted by reader R Till)

About 10 years ago I was visiting New York City overnight with a friend. As we were walking down the street in Brooklyn a car pulled over and the driver asked for directions to such-and-such.

We said we didn’t know, we were just visiting from North Carolina. The driver said they were visiting from Cary, NC (a suburb outside Raleigh). I laughed and said that I lived in Cary, and he said he lived in the Preston subdivision. I told him that I lived in Preston’s “rival” subdivision at the time (suburbs are so weird like that haha).

I hope he found the place he was looking for…

[EDITOR: This is the sort of story you tend to hear a lot of, or variations of it. Certainly you get people who grew up together running into each other, but you also get stories of people from the same neighborhood, school, street, etc. who never met (sometimes separated by time, sometimes by pure chance) finding each other somewhere else. This one seems ripe for statistical analysis, as it’s clearly common enough, and when you consider populations, tourist destinations, transplant rates, etc., it’s definitely guaranteed to happen pretty darn regularly, which is exactly what we see here. But it’s still pretty jarring when you see it.

Years back I filmed a movie in Salt Lake City with Nick Cassavetes before he had stepped into (and nicely filled) his father’s directing shoes and was still acting. We spent a lot of time off-set together and when hometowns were discussed it turned out he had lived in mine when he was younger. We narrowed down the exact building in which he lived, which was directly next to the DMV. It was particularly infamous to me because during one of my lengthy visits to that lovely bastion of hope and cheeriness a crowd had formed by the window to watch as a man stood nude in his full-height living room window, displaying himself gleefully to everyone there. Thankfully Nick confirmed this was NOT when he lived there and he was definitely not the man in the window. But it’s a perfect example of those funny little hometown connections in a very unexpected place that lead to a great story.]