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Humbug is an old term meaning hoax or jest. While the term was first described in 1751 as student slang, its etymology is unknown. Its present meaning as an exclamation is closer to 'nonsense' or 'gibberish', while as a noun, a humbug refers to a fraud or impostor, implying an element of unjustified publicity and spectacle. The term is also used for certain types of candy.

In modern usage, the word is most associated with Ebenezer Scrooge, a character created by Charles Dickens. His famous reference to Christmas, "Bah! Humbug!", declaring Christmas to be a fraud, is commonly used in stage and television versions of A Christmas Carol.

Famous Humbug of the actress/singer/manager Jenny Lind outside P. T. Barnum's New American Museum, New York City, 1850.

P. T. Barnum was a master of humbug, creating public sensations and fascination with his masterful sense of publicity. Many of his promoted exhibitions were obvious fakes, but the paying public enjoyed viewing them, either to scoff or for the wonder of them. If the word humbug enjoyed contemporary usage, it would likely be applied to supermarket tabloids and the publicity industry. A famous humbug took place on the arrival of the actress/theatre manager Jenny Lind to America, just outside the showplace of P. T. Barnum, the New American Museum, in 1850 (etching, right).

One of the most famous uses of the word was by John Collins Warren, a Harvard Medical School professor who worked at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Warren performed the first public operation with the use of ether anesthesia, administered by William Thomas Green Morton, a dentist. To the stunned audience at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Warren declared, "Gentlemen, this is no humbug!"^[1]

In Norton Juster's novel The Phantom Tollbooth, there is a large beetle-like insect known as the Humbug, who is hardly ever right about anything.

Etymology

It has also existed in many other countries, unconnected with the British Empire, for a long time. For instance, in Germany it has been known since the 1830s,^[2] in Sweden since at least 1862,^[3] in French since at least 1875,^[4] in Hungarian,^[5], Russian ^[6] and in Finnish.^[7]

The oldest known written uses of the word are in the book The Student (1750-1751), ii. 41, where it is called "a word very much in vogue with the people of taste and fashion." and in Ferdinando Killigrew's The Universal Jester, subtitled "a choice collection of many conceits ... bonmots and humbugs" from 1754; as mentioned in Encyclopædia Britannica from 1911, which further refers to the New English Dictionary.^[8]

There are many theories as to the origin of the term, none of which have been proven:

• Charles Godfrey Leland mentions the idea that the word could be derived from the Norse word hum, meaning 'night' or 'shadow', and the word bugges (used in the Bible), a variant of bogey, meaning 'apparitions'.^[9] The Norse word hum mentioned, or hume, actually means 'dark air' in Old Norwegian. From the other Scandinavian languages based on Old Norse, there is húm in Icelandic which means 'twilight', hómi in Faeroese which means 'unclear', and humi in Old Swedish which means 'dark suspicion', documented back to 1541.^[10] From this word is also derived the Swedish verb hymla, still in use, which means 'to conceal, hide, not commit to the truth'.^[11]

• According to the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose, 1731-1791, to hum in English indeed originally meant 'to deceive'.^[12] To combine this early medieval Scandinavian word with bugges from the English Bible of a later date may seem far-fetched. But it is however plausible that it could have been combined with the much older Celtic word bwg, meaning 'ghost', due to the Viking conquests of the British Isles at the time, which have much influenced English. Bwg is also what developed into "bugges" in Middle English 1350-1400, then with the meaning of scarecrow or similar.^[13] This older connection makes more sense since apparently the term's origin was already unknown in 1751. Also, with bwg meaning ghost, the use of the term applies in Dickens's novel about the Christmas ghosts. In Etym. Diet. of 1898, Walter Skeat also proposed a similar theory, although using contemporary versions of the words, where hum meant to murmur applause, and bug being a spectre.^[14]

• It could also come from the Italian uomo bugiardo, which literally means 'lying man'.^[15] There was considerable Italian influence on English at the time (e.g. Shakespeare's numerous Italian-based plays).

• Uim-bog is supposed to mean 'soft copper' in Irish, worthless money, but there is no evidence of a clear connection to the term.^[16]

• The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica also suggests that it is a form of "Hamburg",^[17] where false coins were minted and shipped to England during the Napoleonic wars, which is inaccurate as the Napoleonic wars were 50 years after the word first appeared in print.

• A modern conception is that it actually refers to a humming bug—i.e. something small and inconsequential, such as a cicada, that makes a lot of noise.^[18]

References

From LoveToKnow 1911