Why We Need Hokum (Part Two)

Last week, we began a discussion of hokum, or why people believe non-scientific things with fervor, passion, and delight, but quickly went sidewise into a discussion of etymology.

While we're on that subject, Bruce Townley writes that I missed an alternate definition of “hokum.” According to Wikipedia, "hokum" is a type of American blues music that uses extended analogies or euphemistic terms to make sexual innuendos.

Bo Carter and the Mississippi Sheiks’ “Banana in Your Fruit Basket” is a good example.

I got a brand new skillet, I got a brand new lead,

All I need is a little woman, just to burn my bread

I'm tellin' you baby, I sure ain't gonna deny,

Let me put my banana in your fruit basket, then I'll be satisfied
 

Now, I got the washboard, my baby got the tub,

We gonna put 'em together, gonna rub, rub, rub

And I'm tellin' you baby, I sure ain't gonna deny,

Let me put my banana in your fruit basket, then I'll be satisfied

Carter is also the author of “Please Warm My Wiener,” “Don’t Mash My Digger So Deep,” and the tragic “My Pencil Won’t Write No More.” Blind Willie McTell recorded “Let Me Play With Your Yo-Yo” in 1933, and perhaps most famously, the Dominoes in 1951 recorded “Sixty Minute Man.”

Gospel composer Thomas Dorsey, better known for “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” and “Peace in the Valley,” also recorded “It’s Tight Like That” under the nom-de-hokum Barrelhouse Tom.

Early country music had a number of hokum hits, mostly sung by white performers in blackface, including “Tom Cat Blues,” “Shanghai Rooster Yodel,” and “That Nasty Swing.”

While hokum has largely died out, along with minstrel shows and blackface entertainers (Ted Danson notwithstanding), ZZ Top’s “Tube Steak Boogie” shows that the hokum impulse has not completely left the musical world.

But of course that’s not the kind of hokum we were talking about.

In the previous installment, I wrote that Wikipedia defined hokum as a synonym of bullshit, but I think there’s an important distinction, coming from the “hocus-pocus” part of the word’s definition.

Ordinary bullshit is simply assertion without fact, the idea that if you shout loud enough and are definite enough, people will tend to believe you. That describes the intent (and sadly, too often the result) of most political dialogue.

Hokum, on the other hand, is all dressed up and ready to party. It has a backstory, whether it’s true or not — with enough plausible-sounding information to make it slide comfortably into your mind like a White Castle hamburger. Unlike bullshit, hokum has a trace of the carny about it. Like science fiction itself, hokum appeals to the sense of wonder in us all.

Of course, labeling a belief as hokum is a direct assault on the people who believe it…which is why I’m punting that chore until next week.



More to come.

Why We Need Hokum (Part One)

We were getting sercon (serious and constructive) during Arnie Katz’s floating perpetual party at this year's Corflu, the convention for fans of amateur publishing (fanzines), held recently in Las Vegas, when the conversation turned to hokum — why people believe non-scientific things with such fervor, passion and delight.

“But we need hokum,” I said.

As I started to explain further, Andy Hooper, fez-wearing superfan, leaned forward and said, “Why don’t you write about that for the upcoming 20th issue of Chunga?”

For those of you not among the science fiction cognoscenti, Chunga is a Hugo-nominated science fiction fanzine published by Andy, Randy Byers, and the mysterious carl juarez. I had appeared in the pages of Chunga previously, collaborating with Jay Kinney on “CorFlu Titanium Tag-Team Con Report,” which appeared in Issue 10. (Corflu Titanium was the 22nd of the series, and took place in San Francisco in 2005.  That year, "CorFlu" was all too appropriate as a name. Although the convention report ends on Sunday, the story continued as a bout of particularly nasty flu plagued attendees for the following week. I was in San Francisco nominally to teach a project management class, where I infected several students. This did not help my ratings.)

Now safely back from Las Vegas, I realized that I hadn’t thought through the topic nearly well enough to satisfy the demanding editorial standards of Chunga. Being in need of a blog post for the week, it occurred to me that I could get some initial thoughts down as a first draft, and from there think about something more solid. So, here goes.

Hokum, helpfully defined by Wikipedia as a synonym for bullshit, is a portmanteau word combining “hocus-pocus” and “bunkum.” The "hocus-pocus" part of hokum refers to its appeal to emotional response rather than inherent truth. Hokum is designed to make you feel an emotion, and in that way it’s often more satisfying than the dry, literal truth would have been.

"Bullshit" refers to emotional appeals disguised as fact (one scribe calls it “relevancies without data”), and thus has its major roots in the areas of politics and advertising. The word “bullshit” has a rather odd history. While the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) suggests the word originates in the Old French boul (fraud or deceit), various forms of animal shit have been used to describe nonsense. My favorite of these is the German bockmist, or “billy-goat shit.”

The OED’s first citation of bullshit as a pejorative comes from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Triumph of Bullshit,” written in the 1910s but only published after his death. Here’s the first stanza:

Ladies, on whom my attentions have waited
If you consider my merits are small
Etiolated, alembicated,

Orotund, tasteless, fantastical,

Monotonous, crotchety, constipated,

Impotent galamatias

Affected, possibly imitated,

For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.

Written in ballade form, the refrain “For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass” ends each verse.

While we’re on the subject, and I have my dictionary open, “bunkum,” interestingly, traces back to my home state of North Carolina, specifically Buncombe County, located in the mountainous western part of the state. "Bunkum" is a collapsed version of “speaking for Buncombe,” and originally took the same spelling as the county name. Its origin traces back to 1820, when US representative Felix Walker, who represented Buncombe County, spoke on the topic of whether Missouri should be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state, but his “long and wearisome speech” drew catcalls and derision from the other members of Congress. “Speaking for Buncombe” became a Washington insider joke, then became common usage under a more phonetic spelling.



More to come.