Thanks for asking

That wasn’t hard to check, but along the way I encountered a new and murkier language question: When did the original Boston Tea Party get its name? Not till decades after the 1773 raid, sources agree. Several of them — including Jill Lepore’s brand-new book about both political Tea Parties, “The Whites of Their Eyes” — credit an 1834 retrospective by George R.T. Hewes with the earliest Boston “Tea Party” citation.

Google Books goes them one better, though: It offers an 1805 issue of the Boston Weekly that reprints toasts reportedly given at an Independence Day celebration a year earlier. One is offered to “The Tea Party: — Thirty-one years since, our fathers’ patriotism deprived our mothers of the use of tea — may our mothers’ tea never deprive us of our fathers’ patriotism.” Such casual use suggests the Tea Party label was already in circulation, and if there are earlier citations, surely Bostonians should be the ones to unearth them. Sons and daughters of Liberty — to the archives!

Another word steeped in American history is buncombe, “nonsense,” named for Buncombe County, N.C. The story goes (more or less) that Felix Walker, the district’s representative, orating irrelevantly on the House floor in 1820, resisted his fellows’ pleas to stop. He wasn’t speaking to them, he said, but “for Buncombe” — that is, for the newspaper accounts that his constituents would see.

In a recent column, I spelled the word bunkum, quoting an 1848 slang dictionary and shocking reader Jay Gold: “I always thought the proper spelling was buncombe,” he said, citing H.L. Mencken for support. So I went back for another look. Yes, Mencken used buncombe, but he gave both spellings as equal variants, like ketchup and catsup. He really had no choice: Bunkum had made its move early — the Oxford English Dictionary dates it to 1828 — and was well established when Mencken published “The American Language” in 1921.