If you ’ve tuned in to seeJoe Bidenin a public debate anytime since at least 2012 , you ’ve hear him call his adversary ’s plans " malarkey . " Every time he passes this judgment , search of this uneven and fun - to - say wordspike on Merriam - Webster ’s website . After he used it in a 2020presidential public debate , " malarkey " was in the top 30 percent of all lookup on the site , and this same dictionary named it a2020 Word of the Year , along with " coronavirus , " " asymptomatic " and " schadenfreude . "
But why " malarkey " ? Where does this weird word even come from ?
A lot of masses , apparentlyincluding Biden , believe " malarkey " to come from Ireland . But its first - known usage is in the United States in the early 1920s . It ’s not a widely used word in Ireland or Great Britain , even today . The Oxford English Dictionary pegs its first utilization in 1923 in an clause published in the Defiance Crescent - News , a local newspaper in Ohio :
But many hunt the term back to a political cartoonist , Thomas Aloysius Dorgan , whose body of work was accredit in the composition by his initial : Tad . He used the full term as early on as 1922 in the San Francisco Call & Post , consort to apaper bring out in 2002.Other sourcespoint to a cartoon by Tad published in the Madison ( Wisconsin)Capital Times in 1924 , where a character says , " Malachy , you enjoin it . "
Over the year , people have hypothesized that the parole come from an Irish surname , Mullarkey , or the advanced Greek word for soft , " malakia . " But most scholars give these ideas little credit . It ’s also been spelled several different ways , including Tad ’s " malachy ; " without an atomic number 99 , as in " malarkey ; " and the most unremarkably accepted manner , as in the Merriam - Webster entry , " malarkey . "
According to the 2002 paper , which was published in the journal Western Folklore , there could still be an Irish link . Irish Gaelic has the root " meall- , " which has connotations of deception or lies . The wordmealleairachtmeans deception , allurement , or amusement , which has a very malarkey - like flavor . The newspaper ’s generator , William Sayers , makes the case that the Bible came to San Francisco with Irish immigrant in the early 20th one C , but American spike misheard the precise orthoepy . As the word moved eastward , it became " malarkey . "
And now the word has achieve what all words dream of : being used by a presidential candidate in a debate of national grandness .
