Some would-be genii will tell you – without being asked – that the plural of octopus is octopi and the plural of omnibus is omnibi and, for that matter, the plural of hocus-pocus (why do you even need one) is hoci-poci.
This is because of the well-ensconced prestige of Latin in the English language, combined with the capriciousness of English, where we assume that, ceteris paribus, weirder is more likely to be correct. Latin is like a visiting kid who gets to take the upper bunk. The result is a lot of bunkum and hokum, harum-scarum. It’s time for some debunking.
Of course all those words I just used – bunkum, hokum, harum-scarum – are supposed to look like Latin. They’re supposed to look like their plurals should be bunka and hoka and hara-scara (how does that even work – it’s an adverb and adjective). But they’re not. You’re being tricked. It’s all hocus-pocus.
Let’s start with harum-scarum. This looks sort of like it means “scaring the hoes” but it means, more or less, ‘willy-nilly’. It comes from extremely not Latin. In fact, it draws on atavistic Anglo-Saxon morphology: as far as we can tell, it is from “hare ’em, scare ’em,” where hare is a short form of harass and scare is scare and ’em is ‘them’, formed not by dropping the th (we don’t do that – no one says “’is and ’at” for “this and that”) but by recalling the old Anglo-Saxon third-person plural, hem; the modern them form came from Norse, when the Norse occupied a large slab of England. Anyway, the idea was one of fright and disarray, and somehow that ended up referring just to the messiness that results from same. And the pseudo-Latin -um endings appeared for the sake of rhyme and stayed on like stickum.
That one is the odd one out here, however. It’s the guest at the family party. Let’s turn our eyes to hocus-pocus.
Obviously hocus-pocus avails itself of the same sing-song rhyming and the same Latin look. And some people say that it’s even from Latin. John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury, asserted confidently in the late 1600s that it was a mockery of “Hic est corpus.” But as far as anyone can tell, he just decided that on the basis of its sounding plausible and giving him something to condemn. At least as likely, it’s just fake Latin made up by a conjurer – a stage magician – who had invented the incantation “Hocus pocus, tontus talontus, vade celeriter jubeo.” It just… sounded right. Basic phonotactical imitation.
Certainly, on the basis of its plainly being fake Latin, you could justify going with an according nominative plural, hoci-poci (weirdly – or not – however, no one wants to use, for example, the plural dative, hocoribus-pocoribus). But then how about hokum?
Well, how about it? It make look like a neutering and respelling of hocus, but as far as anyone can tell, it’s a blend of hocus and bunkum. It means ‘flim-flam’, of course. But what’s with this bunkum? Ah, thereby hangs a tale.
The tale, just to take it straight from Wiktionary, is this:
In 1820, Felix Walker, who represented the county [of Buncombe, North Carolina] in the U.S. House of Representatives, rose to address the question of admitting Missouri as a free or slave state, his first attempt to speak on the subject after nearly a month of solid debate, right before the vote was to be called. To the exasperation of colleagues, he began a long and wearisome speech, explaining that he was speaking not to Congress but “to Buncombe.” He was ultimately shouted down by his colleagues, though his speech was published in a Washington paper and his persistence made “buncombe” (later respelled “bunkum”) a synonym for meaningless political claptrap and later for any kind of nonsense, at first only in the jargon of Washington and then in common usage.
Yes, once it became a mass noun for a substance, it was natural to have that -um that you see on gypsum and uranium and so forth. And just to cover the rest of the ground: The county was named after Edward Buncombe, a colonel in the Revolutionary War. His surname came from Somerset, England, and meant ‘reed valley’. And through the wonder of linguistic evolution, it referred to a speech that had gone into a valley and got lost in the reeds, and now, especially in its short form bunk, it refers to claptrap, hoo-hah, nonsense.
And if you expose and remove the bunk? Why, you debunk, of course. Yes, a verb that could as readily refer to tossing someone out of a bed – in much the same way as defenestrate refers to tossing someone out a window – instead refers to exposing falsehoods and misrepresentations. Which it does through appealing to a misrepresentation (as Latin when it is not) and a falsehood (the fake Latin incantation) – and of course the mistaken suppositions and deliberate misdirections, the hocus-pocus, that is going on harum-scarum throughout the language.
Sesquiotica 