World Needs More Piffle, More Twaddle

What the world needs now is more poppycock.

Not to mention more tommyrot, more twaddle, more hogwash and more piffle.

What the world needs fewer of are four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, or two four-letter Anglo-Saxon words stuck together, the kind with initials such as B.S., which people use too often instead of something creative, such as “poppycock.”

So I want to return to those glorious days in which people used ridiculous euphemisms and didn’t feel ridiculous for doing so.

Now, as a child of the latter half of the 20th century, I have no particular moral problem with obscenities. I grew up with ‘em, I’ve heard them all my life, and now in the ‘90s I have grown used to hearing them uttered on radio, television and movies, often for comic effect by 6-year-olds or grandmas.

So my concern is strictly linguistic. Uttering a time-worn Anglo-Saxon expletive takes no imagination. Uttering something like “fiddlesticks” or “flapdoodle,” now that takes some inspiration.

You can make up your own words on the spot, like “bush ‘n’ gore,” as in, “What a crock of bush ‘n’ gore,” but the beauty of the English language is, you don’t have to. I can think of at least two dozen euphemisms for B.S. right off the top of my head.

Many of these are euphemisms of what I would call the “near-miss” variety, in which the mouth begins to form the bad word itself but catches itself just in time. This is the only explanation for “bushwah,” a popular slang term from the 1920s which I intend to revive. It is also the explanation for any word that begins with a “bull” sound, up to and including “baloney” and “balloon juice,” the latter not explainable by any other rational means, since balloons contain no juice, or at least no juice that I would order for breakfast.

Sometimes the “near-miss” words are slightly more subtle, such as bunk, bunkum, or even bilge, and other times they’re not so subtle at all, such as bull-pucky. No one knows exactly what “pucky” means, but most agree that whatever it is, it probably smells bad.

Other euphemisms don’t necessarily sound like the words they mean to replace, but instead sound even more colorful and descriptive. Take the word “flumadiddle” for instance. If I told you that you were “completely full of flumadiddle” you wouldn’t know exactly what you are full of, but you would assume that anything called “flumadiddle” would have to be something unpleasant, and not something you would want to be full of, such as wisdom.

Other words are borrowed from other languages, such as blarney, which comes from Gaelic, and malarkey, which sounds like it comes from Gaelic although no one actually knows. In other words, the idea that malarkey is Gaelic may turn out to be a pile of malarkey.

And then there are words which have seemingly come from nowhere, but which are pure populist poetry:

* “That’s a bunch of hooey.”

* “That’s a complete crock of claptrap.”

* “That’s a total ton of tripe.”

* “Hey! Get a load of this line of hokum.”

* “Whadda you trying to sell me here? A line of banana oil?”

* “You know what it sounds like to me? A bunch of gobbledy-gook.”

* “I have never heard any man utter such unmitigated applesauce.”

* “I consider that line of argument, sir, to be pure fiddle-faddle.”

* “You, my friend, are speaking unadulterated bafflegab.”

These last two should be reserved for debates in the House of Lords. Yet my point is, that even without fiddle-faddle and bafflegab, the English language is incredibly rich in expression and variety, especially when it comes to words that mean, more or less, “pshaw.”

So why on Earth would we want to go with the old, tired obscenities for barnyard detritus when the richness and variety of English expression cries out for us to say, “Narrishkeit! I’ve had enough! I will no longer be content with uttering mere twaddle when I can utter some true phonus bolonus!”

The world will be better for it, and — speaking strictly as a newspaper columnist — these words have the advantage of being printable.