Is the great old Aussie word ‘bloke’ an offensive word? The army thinks it is. Writing in the Daily Telegraph Maurice Newman says that ‘the Australian Defence Force has ordered adherence to politically correct language. “Bloke” is gender triggering, so it is banned’.This grows partly out of the latest wave of feminism that seems to be more anti-men than pro-women. And, perhaps oddly, it also grows out of the trans-bullying movement that says there’s no such thing as ‘men’ and ‘women’ – so no one should ever be called a man (a bloke) or a woman. What we are witnessing in our society is the death of common sense about language. The Australian Defence Force is no longer a lethal force threatening our enemies – all it is capable of killing these days is words. No one knows for sure the origin of ‘bloke’, but the best guess is that it comes from the language of gypsies and tinkers. Presumably it was brought to Australia by convicts. Its earliest recorded usage here is from 1841, from Van Diemen’s Land, where it referred to the man in charge, the proprietor or boss. And if you wanted to be treated decently and fairly then you had to find a boss (a ‘bloke’) to work for who was a ‘good bloke’. As a result, qualities of fairness and decency came to be attached to this word ‘bloke’ as it became a generalised term in Aussie English for an adult male. The word has developed again in more recent times, to be associated with what is called ‘blokeyness’ – for instance, in the hearty, noisy behaviour of football players. But the word ‘bloke’ retains its association with good intentions, good heartedness, and decency. Unless, of course, you have made the mistake of joining the Australian Army – which these days is genderless.

Andrew Giles’ attempts to be a competent Immigration Minister have been thoroughly debunked – and a Speccie readers asks me to explain the origin of ‘debunk’. The word is American in origin, first recorded in 1923. To ‘debunk’ means to remove nonsense – since that is the meaning of the suffix ‘bunk’, this being the one syllable abbreviation of ‘bunkum’, which entered the American language in 1828 (the original spelling was ‘Buncombe’) with a congressman named Felix Walker. He was the Congressional representative of the electoral district of Buncombe (in North Carolina). At the close of the protracted Missouri statehood debates in the US Congress, Walker began what promised to be a ‘long, dull, irrelevant speech,’ saying he was bound to say something that could appear in the newspapers in his home district. ‘I shall not be speaking to the House,’ he confessed, ‘but to Buncombe.’ Some versions of the story say that he often referred to his home district in his long-winded and often irrelevant speeches, inserting the words ‘I speak for Buncombe.’ This was changed over time by his cynical colleagues who insisted he wasn’t speaking for Buncombe, but was just speaking plain Buncombe. Thus, ‘bunkum’ has been American English slang for ‘nonsense’ since 1841. Over time the spelling changed from ‘Buncombe’ to ‘bunkum’ and this was then shortened to ‘bunk’ – which (about a hundred years after its birth) gave us the Andrew Giles expression ‘debunk.’