hokum
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: compound
Topics: entertainment
lifestyle
music
Etymology: Uncertain; first attested as US theater slang, possibly a blend of hocus-pocus + bunkum.
Compound parts: hocus-pocus
bunkum
Inflected forms:
form: hokums
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: hocum
pos: noun
tags: alternative
Senses:
gloss: (An instance of) meaningless nonsense with an outward appearance of being impressive and legitimate.
pos: noun
tags: countable
informal
uncountable
usually
examples: Recently that publication [Collier's Weekly] has been filling its readers with the good old hokum about red likker and its steady disappearance, and if what has been offered be but half true, beer, light wine and all of the other beverages which have been tabooed by law, are on their way to that place where nothing returns.
Being in a mood of constructive criticism, I suggest that all future student conferences be made strictly social affairs. All addresses, forum discussions, patriotic service, and other hocums, as such, shall be done away with. Outside of a handful of persons, who either had to or did not know any better, everybody shunned the non-social events.
I think we have learned to beware of these political charlatans. We have enough horse sense to neutralize their hokum. But let's start right now to take their hokum apart and show up its component elements for just what they are—the siren songs of demagogy.
It is pure hocum, this language that they want more police officers, and they vetoed it over the lack of funding in this account. It is just a pure political thing.
gloss: (An instance of) excessively contrived, hackneyed, or sentimental material in a film, television programme, theater production, etc.
pos: noun
tags: countable
informal
uncountable
usually
examples: The majority of the twenty-six stunts described in this volume belong to a species of so-called hokum acts derived from the professional stage and handed down through several generations of actors.
Every experienced playwright, every manager, every stage director, every intelligent actor who has passed his novitiate, knows of things that always have received a certain definite response. Many of these have been formulated. In the sad, glad days of prosperous melodrama they were known as "sure-fire hokum." [...] The "sure-fire hokum" of murderous melodrama encompassed, in a crudely elemental form it is true, nearly all the essentials of success in dramatic situation, most of the values that make popular favor for a play.
Probably nowhere else do the popular playmakers of Broadway reveal their imaginative shortcomings so clearly as in the employment of what is colloquially known as hokum. In particular, comedy hokum. [...] Year in and year out, and (though still largely sure-fire) become drably stereotyped and threadbare, this hokum of tripping over the doormat, throwing an imaginary object into the wings and having the stagehand thereupon strike a gong, and the like, is promulgated in all the glory of its venerable whiskers.
The "classy" stuff is pretty to talk about, it furnishes inspiration for the dramatic writer, but it is the hocum, the jazbo, what vaudeville styles "comedy acts," which please an audience.
[M]ostly the moviegoer has to put up with clumsily contrived fist fights, musical brogues spoken as though the actor were coping with an excess of tobacco juice in his mouth, mugging that plays up all the trusted hokums that are supposed to make the Irish so humorous-sympathetic, and a script that tends to resolve its problems by having the cast embrace, fraternity-brother fashion, and break out into full-throated ballads.
An anonymous Warner Bros. story analyst in New York, reading it in manuscript, nevertheless reported the alluring presence of “sophisticated hokum.”
A war gets fought between authenticity and hokum in Short Term 12, and it ends in an uneasy truce. [...] As it goes along, however, Short Term 12 increasingly succumbs to a screenwriter's worst impulses, becoming neat and tidy in ways that undermine what’s so good about it.
gloss: A film, television programme, theater production, etc., containing excessively contrived, hackneyed, or sentimental material.
pos: noun
tags: countable
informal
usually
examples: [H]e [Stanley Baker] was still churning out the kind of Boy's Own hokums and dreary international espionage thrillers that defined that bygone era.
gloss: A genre of blues song or music, often characterized by sexual innuendos or satire.
pos: noun
tags: uncountable
usually
examples: [D]uring the 'twenties, jazz developed from an infrequent ‘hokum’ music in a few vaudeville acts to a household commodity.
As a result a hybrid music, ‘hokum’, became popular. It owed much to ‘Georgia Tom’ Dorsey, Tampa Red and Big Bill Broonzy, and the first recordings in the idiom appeared around 1929. Many recordings by The Famous Hokum Boys, the Hokum Trio, The Hokum Boys and similar groups were recorded by 1930. Jokey, often bawdy, frequently satirical, they employed rural techniques in an urban setting, gently lampooning country ways through a city sophistication.
ES: That thing that you call double bow, I've heard many different names for it. / JG: Rockin' the bow. / ES: I've heard it called a straight shuffle. I've heard it called hocum. Have you ever heard it called hocum? / JG: Yeah, we call the jazz hocum. You see, anything away from the melody.
Pianist [Thomas A.] Dorsey and guitarist Tampa Red popularized the double-entendre, up-tempo novelty blues style known as hokum blues that was a forerunner of the up-tempo rhythm and blues, whose similarly adult lyrics often had to be bowdlerized when covered by white singers for the white teen market in the 1950s.
Blues and hokum intertwined at least through the mid-1930s, when the hokum bands faded out. [...] Hokum was also absorbed into the jazz tradition.
Derived words: hoke
hokey
Translations: