16. Did the term “bunk” come from the lumberjack’s bunkshanty?
A bunkshanty was a shed, or shanty, in which lumberjacks in the American north woods, many of them French-Canadians, slept at night in rows of bunkbeds. It was in these sheds that the tales of Paul Bunyan and his great blue ox Babe, on whom Paul was reputed to have rode, were repeated, with additional embellishments added in each retelling. Paul’s bookkeeper, Johnny Inkslinger, who used a pen manufactured from a hose and a barrel of ink, was said to have invented bookkeeping, just as his boss had invented logging. The stories tossed about in the evenings prior to sleep became the legends which remain a large part of the Northwest’s folklore, and its tourist industry.
During the late nineteenth century the term bunk began to be used as a response to something which was clearly nonsense, a declamatory against something which was obviously unbelievable in a literal sense. In that usage the tales of Paul Bunyan and his contemporaries, which originated in the bunkshanties of the lumber camps, would clearly be considered to be bunk. The origin of the term and where it first came into use is disputed by etymologists, but it could have readily been used by disdainful loggers when a particular tale exceeded the already well stretched bounds of belief and reason.