OH BALDERDASH -- IT'S A BUNCH OF BALONEY!

Or, here's the whole ball of wax on balderdash

By Ovid Publius Hadweenzic, Professor of Piffle and Dean of Do-Nothing & Drollery at the Creative Loafing Institute, where people who like to putter and play do so, just for the heck of it!

The Society of Sacred Cows & Flattering Fairytales has recently published an authoritative article on flamboyant food for thought entitled "What Would the World Be Without Big Cheeses, Big Tunas and Big Whoppers?"

With so much emphasis on "bigger is better", it is not surprising that skeptics see things quite differently. Not impressed with "size matters", be it lattes or legumes, their typical response to all the hullabaloo about a rare sighting of the humongous heffalump, is "balderdash".

All of which brings me to one interesting bit of titillating trivia, no less than 806,000 web pages devoted to "balderdash", (a word meaning any form of speech or writing considered to be nonsensical or trivial in nature).

It's a pity that "Balderdash" is a nifty-sounding noun of unknown origin, (although apparently it found favor with fiddle-faddle folk dating back to the early 16th century). Frankly, being an orphaned orthographic oddity, is probably not much fun, unless one considers just how many uses one can find for this word.

There's a board-game and a game-show by the same name, not to mention a BBC television series entitled "Balderdash & Piffle" highlighting all manner of hilarious hokum associated with hunting for the origin of a lost lexicon.

A sample of boffo books available on the scintillating subject of balderdash include:

-- Balderdash by Edward T. Hering
-- Balderdash! by Jerry Warshaw
-- Balderdash Ballads by J.R. Monsell
-- Balderdash Game by Tsr Staff
-- Boom, Cash & Balderdash - A Different Look at Fairbanks During Pipeline Construction by Jerry Fears
-- Mostly Balderdash by Don Harvey
-- Politics, Barbecues & Balderdash by John Cole
-- The Varieties of Balderdash by Neil Postman
-- Verities & Balderdash (Sheet Music Book) by Harry Chapin

And, it's quite amazing the number of books that have been called "all balderdash", "bottomed balderdash", "clinical balderdash", "critical balderdash", "dangerous balderdash", "full of balderdash", "generally balderdash", "moralistic balderdash", "'New Age' balderdash", "political balderdash", "pure balderdash", "ridiculous balderdash", "sheer balderdash", "sociable balderdash", "spheroids of balderdash", "unmitigated balderdash, "utter balderdash" not to mention "water faucet balderdash".

Now the only question left is, what's the difference between "balderdash" and baloney, a bill of goods, blather, bull, bunk, bunkum, codswallop, claptrap, drivel, flapdoodle, flimflam, flotsam and jetsom, gibberish, gobbledygook, hot air, hocus-pocus, hogwash, hokum, hooey, malarkey, mumbo-jumbo, piffle, poppycock, poppylarky, prattle, a snow job, trifle, tripe, and twaddle?

LIFE LESSON #142: BEWARE OF BABBLING BUFFOONS WHO WALK WITH BIG BOOKS UNDER THEIR ARMS.