Friday, October 12, 2012

Word of the day: malarkey

From a New York Times editorial:

Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. would not sit still for a parade of misleading and often blatantly untruthful descriptions of the state of the economy and the Republican prescriptions for it. Though his grins and head-shakes were often distracting, he did not hesitate to interrupt and demand an end to “malarkey.”
The Oxford English Dictionary defines it:
Humbug, bunkum, nonsense; a palaver, racket. (Usually of an event, activity, idea, utterance, etc., seen as trivial, misleading, or not worthy of consideration.)
One might say that malarkey is Irish for bullshit, but that would be malarkey. The OED notes that “A surname Mullarkey, of Irish origin, exists, but no connection is known between any person of that name and this word.”

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