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Benct Philip Jonsson scripsit:
> What's _malark-_? A new family of words for me!
>
> Wait, the dictionary says _skitsnack_, lit.
> 'sh*t talk' i.e. 'bullsh*t'.
Rightly so.
> But what's the etymology?
Unknown, absolutely unknown. As far as anyone can tell, someone
pulled it out of his bunghole ca. 1929, and it somehow caught on.
It certainly doesn't look like anything else in English. The only guess
even resembling sanity is that it's derived from a name, probably an
Irish one, but whose is utterly mysterious.
Here's a list of synonyms in order of first appearance which I got off a
website (may have some errors in dates). Most of these do have fairly
clear etymologies, though how they came to mean "nonsense" is often
very obscure:
# babble (early 13th century), cock and bull (~1600), prattle
# (mid-16th century), nonsense (early 17th century), foolishness (late
# 15th century), folderol (1820s), humbug (1820s), flummery (1840s),
# flumdiddle (1840s), twaddle (1842), bunk (1850s), flapdoodle (1850s),
# bosh (1850s), fiddle-faddle (1863), poppycock (1865), hot air (1873),
# eyewash (1880s), Tommyrot (1880s), balderdash (1890s), blarney
# (Britain - 18th century, U.S. - 1890s), tripe (late 19th century),
# bullshit/bull (1910s), hogwash (1904), hokum (by 1917), hooey (1920s),
# horseshit (1920s), horsefeathers (late 1920s, possibly euphemism for
# horseshit), baloney (1920s), rubbish (1921).
--
The man that wanders far jcowan@hidden.email
from the walking tree http://www.reutershealth.com
--first line of a non-existent poem by: John Cowan