Plain Talk: This column is full of malarkey

 

• Dave Zweifel | The Capital Times
• https://madison.com/ct/opinion/column/dave_zweifel/plain-talk-this-column-is-full-of-malarkey/article_3a3c9cbe-9944-52af-9cfd-566fc6dee73c.html
  

You might say that today's column is full of malarkey.

The word malarkey, you may have noticed, is one that Joe Biden used frequently during the presidential campaign, going all the way back to the Iowa caucuses last year — even having the words "No Malarkey" painted on the side of his bus as he criss-crossed the state in 2019.

He used it during the last heavily-watched presidential debate on Oct. 22 to describe Donald Trump's typically unfounded claims.

"There's a reason why (Trump) is bringing up all this malarkey. There's a reason for it," Biden proclaimed. "He doesn't want to talk about the substantive issues. It's not about his family and my family. It's about your family."

As an admittedly old guy, I knew the word well. It was used all the time in those good, old days, and more than once we'd accuse each other of being "full of malarkey." That was nicer than using another often-used word.

I'm not sure when malarkey went out of vogue, but obviously it did, because younger people watching the debate were puzzled.

Laurie Wermter, a reference librarian at UW-Madison, noticed a report that a lot of people were looking up the word's meaning in online dictionaries that night.

She went to the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary herself to pinpoint its definition:

"Humbug, bunkum, nonsense; a palaver, racket. (Usually of an event, activity, idea, utterance, etc., seen as trivial, misleading or not worthy of consideration.)"

But, she was surprised to find something else and decided that we at The Capital Times might be interested.

"When I looked it up myself, I discovered that an early usage (1924) of it is credited to the "Capital Times" (Madison, Wisconsin)," she reported in a letter to our editor and publisher Paul Fanlund.

I tried to search our archives to find the story or editorial that used the word, but the search couldn't narrow it down. But, I can imagine William T. Evjue insisting the opponents of "Fighting Bob" La Follette were full of malarkey. It was the year, after all, when the Progressive icon was running for president of the United States.

Laurie Wermter added that she was impressed to find 126 words in the Oxford dictionary in which The Capital Times is cited to document a usage. She added them to the letter she sent.

Among them are "a-go-go" in 1964, "arms control" in 1921, "auto-defrost" in 1940, "barbershopper" in 1930, "brain sucker" in 2002, "color commentator" in 1939, "jack squat" in 1997, "love-bomb" in 1976, "super PAC" in 1993, and "videogram" in 1983.

Thanks to this UW librarian, that's no malarkey. And, hopefully, when these votes are finally all counted, we'll have someone in the White House who remembers what it means.