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Legal Commentary

: Althouse

"'Pre-bunking' ? Shouldn?t that mean something like: making false ahead of time?"

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Texts Meade this morning, sending me a link to "Pre-bunking falsehoods: How Wisconsin voters can avoid falling for election misinformation" (in the Madison newspaper, The Cap Times).

You can imagine the dismal path to linguistic error. They know the word "debunking" and "pre-" rhymes amusing and denotes an earlier point in time, so pre-bunking!

But "pre-bunk" gets over 58 million hits in a Google search, so it's not a special dumbness of Madisonians.

The word "bunk" means "Humbug, nonsense" and goes back at least to 1900, according to the OED, which provides these historical examples:

1900 G. Ade More Fables 15 He surmised that the Bunk was about to be Handed to him.
1916 H. Ford in Chicago Tribune 25 May 10/1 History is more or less bunk.
1919 Rebel Worker (N.Y.) 1 Feb. 3/3 The usual bunk about ?disloyalty? is being employed to..blind them to their own interest.
1921 Glasgow Herald 3 May 3 As an American friend said..?Tell your people at home it is all bunk the United States intends to keep out of European affairs.?

"Debunk" ? which goes back to 1923 ? means to remove the bunk. We understand the prefix "de-." If you want to remove the bunk in advance, you're talking about pre-debunking. Without the "de-," you're just "bunking" ? adding the nonsense!

But there's no word ? not in my dictionary ? "bunking" ? in the sense of adding bunk... though adding bunk is a common enough activity. Maybe we could get that going. It's less obscure than "obscurantism." For now, "bunking" means sleeping in a not-too-fancy bed around other people. So we do have the option of nodding off. But stay awake, dear friends. We may learn something.

Full post as published by Althouse on October 17, 2020 (boomark / email).