Balderdash reaches back to the time of William Shakespeare and originally meant “a hodge-podge of liquids,” such as milk mixed with beer, beer with wine, and brandy with mineral water. Gradually, balderdash came to stand for “pretentious, bombastic, and senseless prose.”

And, of course, balderdash can also mean “a rapidly receding hairline.”

Words that describe words that befuddle and obfuscate possess some of the most fascinating etymologies in the English language:

• gibberish. In Julius Caesar (1604), Shakespeare wrote, “The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.” As the sound of “gibber” indicates, the verb means “to utter incomprehensible prattle.” From to gibber we get the verb to jabber (whence Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”) and the noun gibberish.
• Double Dutch is a Briticism that denotes a meaningless jumble of sounds. We say, “It’s Greek to me,” but the English loved to pick on the Dutch with such expressions as “Dutch treat” (no treat at all), “Dutch courage” (alcohol), and “in Dutch” (in trouble). From the Dutch pappekak we also get poppycock, literally “soft poop,” or “baby poop.”
• Flapdoodle is an American southernism. When you cook and then remove a bunch of pancakes (“flaps”) from a cast-iron skillet that has not been properly seasoned, the designs (“doodles”) are left at the bottom of the pan. Thus the complaint from Confederate troops: “If it wasn’t for those damn Yankees making such a flapdoodle out of nothing, we’d be eating honey and homemade biscuits right now.”

Let’s shine the spotlight on three rhyming reduplications that signify meaningless prattle:

• folderol. Picture a medieval minstrel singing a ballad. He makes it up as he goes along, but every now and then his inspiration fails him. Rather than commit the faux pas of silence, he sings something like “fol-de-rol,” the medieval equivalent of “la-la-la.” In the late seventeenth century folderol, a nonsense word, came to mean “nonsense words.”
• Mumbo jumbo was originally a word in Mandingo that denoted a magician who made the troubled spirits of ancestors go away.
• Hocuspocus is said to issue from the Latin hoc est corpus meum— “this is my body”—from the Roman Catholic mass. From hocus has issued the words hoax, “a mischievous trick,” and hokum, “nonsense.”

In truth, one could compile an entire book of “stuff and nonsense” words—baloney, blarney, bosh, bunk, cockamamie, claptrap, cock-and-bull story, codswallop, doublespeak, fiddle-faddle, flimflam, hogwash, hooey, humbug, malarkey, piffle, twaddle, and tommyrot. That so many people have been able to come up with so many words to identify and describe nonsensical, insincere, and misleading language shows that there is still hope that one day we may create a pollutionfree verbal environment.

(See GOBBLEDYGOOK, HORSEFEATHERS, SUPER DUPER.)

Bash. What do these words have in common: bash, clash, crash, dash, gash, gnash, hash, lash, mash, slash, smash, thrash, and trash?

“The words all rhyme,” you answer.

Right. But can you spot what it is that the thirteen words share in their content?

Faces are bashed, gashed, slashed, and smashed. Cars crash. Hopes are dashed. Armies clash. Teeth gnash. Beef is hashed. Potatoes are mashed. Rooms are trashed. And prisoners are lashed and thrashed.

Now the pattern becomes clearer. All these -ash words are verbs that express repeated actions of great violence. Why, over the more than the fifteen-hundred-year history of the English language, have speakers seized on the -ash sound cluster to create words that describe mutilation?

Listen closely to the a, and you will hear that it sounds like a drawn-out human scream. Now listen closely to the hissing sound of sh, and note that it too takes a long time to expel. The eighteenth century English poet Alexander Pope once wrote that “The sound must seem an echo of the sense.” It appears that the agonizing, hissy, drawn-out sound of -ash is particularly well suited to the sense of violent actions that unfold over seconds, minutes, or even longer periods of time.

(See MOTHER, SNEEZE.)

Bated. In the context of “bated breath,” bated is a form of abated and means “reduced in force or intensity, restrained.” Bated is also a monogamous word, one that can be used with only one other word, in this instance breath. You may have heard about the cat who chewed on some strong-smelling cheese, breathed into a mousehole, and waited with baited breath. Under all other circumstances, it’s bated.

Speaking of mice, it’s easy to see why our word muscle descends from the Latin word musculus, “little mouse.” Certain muscles appeared to move beneath surface of the skin like small mice running.

The baited/bated confusion illustrates the difficulties that we English speakers can experience with homophones—words that sound alike but have different spellings and meanings. How many times have we read about menus guaranteed to “wet your appetite”? Great expectorations! If writers would bear (not bare) in mind the knife’s edge metaphor—the menu is the whetstone upon which the knife’s edge of the appetite is sharpened—they would always spell the verb correctly as whet.

(See AKIMBO.)

Bathroom. Despite the two halves of this word, most bathrooms don’t have any baths in them. In fact, a dog can go to the bathroom under a tree—no bath, no room; but it’s still going to the bathroom. And doesn’t it seem a little bizarre that we go to the bathroom so that we can go to the bathroom?

Bear/Bull. As descriptions of investors, both terms have been around since the early 1700s. The bear market metaphor seems to have arisen out of a story common to many cultures that tells about a man who sold a bearskin before he caught his bear. On this analogy, certain speculators in London’s Exchange, the Wall Street of its day, became known as bearskin jobbers. These financial dice rollers gambled on a falling market, selling stock they didn’t own in the hope that it would drop in value, before they had to deliver it to the purchaser.

The bestial analogy in a bull market is to the habit aggressive bulls have of pushing forward and tossing their heads upward, an apt emblem for a market characterized by investors who believe that stock prices will go up.

Bible. The word bible derives from the Greek biblía , which means “books.” Indeed, the Bible is a whole library of books that contain many different kinds of literature—history, narrative, short stories, poetry, philosophy, riddles, fables, allegories, letters, and drama.

The thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, the twenty-seven books of the New Testament compose the champion bestseller of all time. Translated into more than two thousand languages, the Bible is available to about 80 percent of the world’s people and outsells all other popular books. Each year in the United States alone, approximately 44 million copies are sold and 91 million distributed.

While the spiritual values of the Bible are almost universally recognized, the enduring effect of the Bible on the English language is often overlooked. In truth, a great number of biblical words, references, and expressions have become part of our everyday speech, so that even people who don’t read the Bible carry its text on their tongues.

Here’s a sampling of biblically inspired words:

• talent. In ancient times, a talent was a unit of weight, and this weight of silver or gold constituted a monetary unit, one that figures prominently in a famous parable of Jesus: “For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability” (Matthew 25:14–15).

  The most common modern meaning of the word talent—some special, often God-given ability or aptitude—is a figurative extension of the parable.

  An undeveloped ability is a latent talent, a two-word anagram achieved by simply transposing the first and third letters.

• maudlin. In Mark 16: 9–10, we read, “Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first before Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. And she went and told them that she had been with him, and they mourned and wept.” Medieval and Renaissance painters portrayed a tearful Mary Magdalene so sentimentally that, over the years, her name was transformed into the word maudlin, which now means “tearfully sentimental.”
• shibboleth. In the Book of Judges 12:5–6, we learn about a conflict between the peoples of Gilead and Ephraim: “And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites; and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; then they said unto him, Say now shibboleth.” Because the Ephraimites didn’t have the sh sound in their language, they could not pronounce the word correctly, and 42,000 of them were slain. That’s how the word shibboleth has acquired the meaning that it has today: a password, catchword, or slogan that distinguishes one group from the other.

(See CARNIVAL, GOOD-BYE.)

Bikini. Those skimpy two-piece swimsuits for women are named after the Marshall Islands atoll, where the first hydrogen bombs were tested after World War II. Quite possibly the name bikini was chosen as a metaphor comparing the explosive effect of the swimsuit on men to the bombs detonated on that Pacific atoll.

(See HAMBURGER, LACONIC, SANDWICH.)

Bildungsroman, stitched together from two roots that mean “education novel,” doesn’t denote an office complex in Italy but rather “a story in which the main character matures and gains an education.” Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye are prominent examples of the genre.

Blooper first appeared in American English in the mid-1920s as a baseball term describing a wounded fly ball looped just past the reach of the infielders. Just as bloopers in baseball can make fielders look like bumbling clowns, verbal bloopers can mortify those who make them. Almost at the same time, the verb to bloop began to signify the operating of a radio set to cause it or other sets to emit howls and whistles, perhaps an echo of our reactions to physical or verbal howlers. About a decade later, the nouns bloop and blooper came to signify pratfalls of the body and tongue.

Of the thousands of specimens of inspired gibberish that I’ve captured and put on display, my favorite is this gem that gleamed out from a student essay: “Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a one-hundred foot clipper.” The statement is hysterically unhistorical, and we have no trouble believing that a student actually wrote it. How blunderful that one young scholar’s innocent malapropizing of circumnavigate and accidental pun on clipper can beget such nautical naughtiness.

The all-time best teacher response to a student blooper happened during the 1960s. A professor received a composition in which one of his students enthusiastically described his adventures in Venezuela, where he had worked the previous summer. One error kept appearing throughout the narrative: the student consistently misspelled the word burro as burrow.

Seizing the delicious opportunity, the professor wrote at the end of the essay, “I thoroughly enjoyed your enthusiastic narrative about your adventures in Venezuela and your love of its fauna. But it is apparent to me from your spelling that you do not know your ass from a hole in the ground.”

(See MALAPROPISM, MONDEGREEN, SPOONERISM.)

Blossom is a seven-letter noun and verb with a double letter in the middle. Pluck that double letter, and you end up with the five-letter word bloom, with a different double letter in the middle, but with the same meaning as blossom, as a noun and as a verb.

Being a marsupial, a mother kangaroo carries her young in her pouch. Kangaroo words do the same thing: Within their letters they conceal a smaller version of themselves—a “joey,” which is what a kangaroo’s offspring is called. The joey must be the same part of speech as the mother kangaroo, and its letters must appear in the same order.

The special challenge of kangaroo words is that the joey must be a synonym; it must have the same meaning as the fully grown kangaroo. A plagiarist is a kind of liar. A rapscallion is a rascal. On the job, your supervisor is your superior. And (one of the best pairings) people who are rambunctious are also raucous.

I’ve trained as many kangaroo words as I could to hop through this poem:

Ab-Original Words

Hop right up to those kangaroo words,

Slyly concealing whiz-bangaroo words,

Accurate synonyms, cute and acute,

Hidden diminutive words, so minute.

Lurking inside of myself you’ll find me.

Just as inside of himself you’ll find he.

Feel your mind blossom; feel your mind bloom:

Inside a catacomb’s buried a tomb.

Kangaroo words are precocious and precious,

Flourishing, lush words that truly refresh us.

We’re nourished; they nurse, elevate, and elate us.

We’re so satisfied when their synonyms sate us.

Kangaroo words both astound us and stun.

They’re so darned secure that we’re sure to have fun!

With charisma and charm, they’re a letter-play wonder.

They dazzle and daze with their treasures, down under.

(See SYNONYM.)

Bolt. The fastest man in the world at the time this book was published is Usain Bolt. Louis Jean and Auguste Marie Lumière created the first movies that told stories. In French, Lumière means “light.”

Names such as Bolt and Lumière that are especially suited to the profession or a characteristic of their owners are called aptronyms. Believe it or not, Daniel Druff is a barber, C. Sharpe Minor a church organist, and James Bugg an exterminator. Some aptronymic personages are famous:

• champion tennis player Margaret Court
• football star Jim Kiick
• baseball stars Early Wynn, Herb Score, Johnny Bench, and Cecil and Prince Fielder
• golf stars Gary Player and Tiger Woods (woods are golf clubs)
• astronaut Sally Ryde
• presidential spokesperson Larry Speakes
• Romantic poet William Wordsworth
• World Series of Poker champions Jamie Gold and Chris Moneymaker
• American judge Learned Hand
• manufacturer of toilets Thomas Crapper
• and (joke alert!) spouse snipper Lorena Bobbitt (Get it? “Bob it”).

While we’re on the topic of spot-on appropriate surnames, it wasn’t that long ago that Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash, and Bob Hope were alive. But now we have no Jobs, no Cash, and no Hope.

Here’s a cute game that employs aptronymic first names: these days, we often attend conferences, parties, and other gatherings where we are asked to wear name tags that say, “Hello, I’m______.”

The object of our game is to match a real first name with a real profession to spark a punny connection, as in “My name is Homer, and I’m a baseball player,” “My name is Jimmy, and I’m a safecracker,” and “My name is Mary, and I’m a justice of the peace.”

Even more spectacular are serial puns on names and professions. Hello, our names are:

• Alexis, Carmen, Chevy, Jack, Mercedes, Otto, Phillip, and Rusty, and we work on cars.
• Annette, Bob, Brooke, Eddie, Gil, and Tad, and we’re fishermen.
• Beech, Sandy, Shelly, and Wade, and we’re lifeguards.
• Bill, Buck, and Penny, and we work at the mint.
• Bud, Daisy, Holly, Iris, Lily, Pansy, Petunia, Rose, and Violet, and we sell flowers.
• Case, Courtney, Sue, and Will, and we’re lawyers.

Bookkeeper is the only common word that features three consecutive pairs of double letters. It is easy to imagine the bookkeeper’s assistant, a subbookkeeper, who boasts four consecutive pairs of double letters.

Now let’s conjure up a zoologist who helps maintain raccoon habitats. We’d call that zoologist a raccoon nook keeper—six consecutive sets of double letters!

Not done: Now let’s imagine another zoologist who studies the liquid inside chickadee eggs. We’d call this scientist a chickadee egg goo-ologist—and into the world is born three consecutive sets of triple letters!

(See SWEET-TOOTHED.)

Boss. We can thank early Dutch settlers for our word boss, which began as baas, “master.” Noting the English spelling, it’s apparent that your b-o-s-s is a backward double s.o.b!

(See BRAND, DESSERTS, FILIBUSTER.)

Brand. Brand names spring from the practice of branding animals—and human beings—to indicate ownership. A product that is brand new is as fresh as a newly branded calf. A number of trademarked items lend themselves to letter play:

• Wal-Mart (retail megastores) spoonerized becomes a Mall Wart.
• Tylenol (analgesic), Pepsi (cola), and Yamaha (motorcycles) are among the product names that cry out to be palindromed: lonely Tylenol, Pepsi is pep, and Ah, May, a Yamaha.
• Reversing another brand name, we wonder are the purveyors of Evian bottled water trying to put something over on us? No? Then why is the Evian brand name naive spelled backwards?
• Even more infelicitous are the reversals of the products Tums (antacid tablets), Dial (soap), and Tulsa (gasoline).
• If you chew a Tic Tac (breath mint) switching the two halves of the pellet, that could be a wise social TacTic.
• If you tack an s onto the end of Saltines (crackers), you get saltiness.
• Advil (analgesic) anagrams into valid and spandex (stretch fabric) into expands.
• Avis (car rental) with the first letter looped to the back becomes Visa (credit card).
• Avon (cosmetics) reversed becomes Nova (a car manufactured by Chevrolet).
• Camry automobile, yields, with letters in order, my and then, from what’s left, car. The name of the manufacturer of the Camry is Toyota. Capitalized, A TOYOTA is not just a palindrome; every letter therein features left-right symmetry and is itself palindromic. Civic automobile is a palindrome composed of Roman numerals.

Here are a dozen more palindromic brand names:

Aviva (insurance)

Aziza (cosmetics)

Elle (magazine)

Eve (cigarettes)

Mum (deodorant)

Noxon (silver polish)

Pep (cereal)

See’s (candies)

S.O.S. (scouring pads)

TNT (TV channel)

Tat (insect repellant)

Xanax (sedative)

(See XEROX.)

Buffalo. Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is a possible sentence, and it raises the question why buffalo (from a Latin word for “wild oxen”) has become a verb denoting “to confuse, baffle, frustrate.” The answer is that, despite the slaughter of tens of millions in the United States, the animal is hard to kill individually. Buffalo are swift, tough, and belligerent.

Products made from buffalo were plentiful in the nineteenth century, including strips of buffalo hide that were used to bring metals to a high polish. That’s where we get the verb to buff. Firemen wore buffalo robes as their winter gear. Dandies who had nothing better to do than to rush to fires and watch the burning, emulated the firefighters by donning the same buffcoats, as they were called. These men became known as buffs, and, by extension, a buff is anyone avidly devoted to a pursuit or hobby. And because these buffcoats were the color of human skin, in the buff arose as a synonym for “naked.”

The vogue meaning of buff as “well built, muscular, hunky” also reflects buffalo, an image of rugged strength.

Buffalo is one of more than fifty animal names that can function as a verb:

ape

badger

bird

bird dog

bitch

buck

bug

bull

carp

chicken (out)

clam (up)

cow

crane

crow (about)

dog

duck

eagle

fawn

ferret

fish

flounder

(out) fox

(leap) frog

goose

grouse

gull

hawk

hog

horse (around)

hound

lion(ize)

louse (up)

monkey (with)

parrot

pig (out)

pigeon(hole)

pony (up)

quail

ram

rat (out)

rook

skunk

snake

snipe (at)

sponge

squirrel (away)

toady

weasel (out of)

wolf

worm (out of)

(See BUTTERFLY, CANARY, CAPER, CLAM, CRESTFALLEN, DACHSHUND, DANDELION, HORSEFEATHERS, OSTRACIZE, PARTRIDGE, PEDIGREE, TAD, TURKEY, VACCINATE, ZYZZYVA.)

Butterfly. Behold the convergence of etymology and entomology. The butterfly may take its name from the medieval belief that these insects stole milk and butter in the dark of night. Or it may be that the creature is simply the color of butter, and it flies.

What we can be sure of is that a butterfly will flutter by—and a dragonfly will drink its flagon dry.

(See BUFFALO, CANARY, CAPER, CLAM, CRESTFALLEN, DACHSHUND, DANDELION, HORSEFEATHERS, OSTRACIZE, PARTRIDGE, PEDIGREE, TAD, TURKEY, VACCINATE, ZYZZYVA.)