“If you read ‘Paradise Lost,’ they think you’re a demon-worshipper.”

– Bill Flowers, owner of the Milestone Club in Charlotte, describing (in 1982) his neighbors’ reaction to the New Wave scene

This week the Milestone, still gritty but and now venerated, celebrates its 40th anniversary. Saturday: Raleigh’s Birds of Avalon. Among past acts: R.E.M., Nirvana, Melissa Etheridge, the Violent Femmes, the Go-Gos and Bo Diddley.

The origin of “bunkum” — N.C. Congressman Felix Walker’s explanation of his longwinded, irrelevant speech on the Missouri Compromise as “talking for Buncombe” — approaches common knowledge, but the late columnist William Safire traced some notable details in “Safire’s Political Dictionary”:

“By 1828…talking to (or for) Buncombe was well known. The Wilmington (N.C.) Commercial referred in 1849 to ‘the Buncombe politicians — those who go for re-election merely,’ and British author Thomas Carlyle showed that the expression traveled the Atlantic with its meaning intact: ‘A parliament speaking through reporters to Buncombe and the 27 millions, mostly fools’…

“In 1923 William E. Woodward wrote a book titled Bunk and introduced the verb ‘debunk.’ A school of historians were named debunkers for the way they tore down the myths other historians had built up. Hokum, according to the OED, is a blend of hocus-pocus and bunkum.”

“The scheme is so transparently impossible, so plainly a gold-brick proposition, that ordinarily the inmates of a school for the feebleminded could not be induced to part with their coin for a certificate of membership…

“But running through the whole scheme is a wicked appeal to race prejudice. There is a hark back to the lawless time that followed the Civil War…There is no need for any secret order to enforce the law of this land…Just now all of us need to be considerate and kind and trustful in our dealings with the Negro.”

– Gov. Thomas Bickett, circa 1921, responding to the revival of the KKK inspired by The Birth of a Nation. Bickett was quoted in an NAACP handbill calling on citizens not to “allow Ku Klux Klan propaganda to be displayed in the movies in New York City.”

The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography describes Bickett as “a traditionalist in his attitude toward race relations [who] nonetheless manifested a sympathy for the lot of the blacks uncommon among Southern politicians of his time.”

“Somebody once said, ‘A Yankee is worth a bale of cotton, and he’s easier to pick.’”

John Shelton Reed, UNC Chapel Hill sociologist, speculating (in 2000) on the guiding principle behind the entertainment complex South of the Border.

“People don’t eat like they talk.”

Ron Doggett, then-CEO of GoodMark Foods in Raleigh, explaining the popularity of Slim Jim sausages in a supposedly fat-phobic culture (1996).