The Joe Biden 2020 campaign rolled out a bus emblazoned with a shiny new slogan: “No malarkey!”
The Oxford English Dictionary dates “malarkey” — and the alternate spelling, “malarky” — to around the 1920s. There’s no definitive etymological explanation for its origin, though various sources say it has something or other to do with Irishness, perhaps an Irish surname. It doesn’t mean anything in Gaelic, anyway, and it has circulated more commonly in the United States than Ireland, so it might have been a slang coinage among Irish-American immigrants. Biden seems to believe some version of this origin story. Asked what he meant when he said, “That’s a bunch of stuff,” to call something dishonest nonsense, he demurred from another S-word and replied, “We Irish call it ‘malarkey.’”
Wherever it comes from exactly, it gives off a strong sense of when it comes from. It’s old-timey. For all the commentary, you’d think he had lacquered the slogan onto his campaign caboose for a whistle-stop tour of all 48 states that made up the union when he was born, Lindy Hopping all the while. The whole thing recalls when Justice Antonin Scalia, who was six years older than Biden, wrote a 2013 dissent in a case about the Defense of Marriage Act employing the term “argle-bargle.”
And while I’m not likely to go using argle-bargle or malarkey the next time I hear something I think is bunk or cant or humbug or balderdash, these are fun, direct words with shades of meaning. Am I jealous of my grandparents’ generation for being able to say things such as “hooey!” without any shame in the delivery? Sure am.
As for the place of “malarkey” in American political history, any entry in a dictionary of political terms would have to have a picture of Biden himself next to it. He’s used it dozens of times and at major moments. Most memorably, the Obama reelection campaign promoted Twitter ads for the trending #malarkey after Biden accused then-vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan of employing “a bunch of malarkey” in his assessment of the Obama administration’s Middle East policies.
Verbal social mores are very precious today, and the self-deputized word police are always watching. But unlike in Biden’s day, we’ve loosened up about using so-called profanities. Swearing is not the sort of linguistic propriety we now worry over. Back when it was much more transgressive, it might have been useful to have an array of words for calling BS without quite resorting to the expletive and without resorting to euphemism either. Biden’s slogan does just that, with the power of one striking, fogey-ish word. It implies his opponents traffic in nonsense, and it associates him with a time when, in many Americans’ nostalgic recollections, politicking wasn’t quite so coarse.
Using “malarkey” does mark him as an old codger, but is that such a bad thing? Biden is not going to succeed in any appeal as the young and with-it candidate, anyway. Plus, codgers vote, dagnabbit. Two cheers for Biden’s outdated slogan.
