Today’s word is something you might hear from your grandfather or grandmother.

Not that that isn’t cool – on the contrary, it’s quite worthy of being taken down from the metaphorical slang shelf and dusted off.

I’m talking about “malarkey.”

Indeed, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) so helpfully puts it, this American expression describes something or someone (or an event) that is, to put it simply, a load of hooey, “humbug, bunkum or nonsense.” In other words, or to put it another way, malarkey isn’t worth your time or attention.

Perhaps it's a synonym for a harsher word? Hmmm, well, I'll let you think about that.

But as for where it comes from, no one really knows for sure. It’s one of those words that the dictionary, even one as thorough and zealous as the OED, labels, “origin unknown.”

But that doesn’t mean one can’t speculate; indeed, even the OED cannot help it. While there is an Irish surname spelled “Mullarkey,” there isn’t much of a reason for it to be the cause of malarkey. One theory holds that it’s related to “malacia,” which comes from the classical Latin word, as influenced by the Greek, and meaning, “a disorder of the stomach, especially as experienced by pregnant women.”

According to the OED, it can also mean an “abnormal craving for certain kinds of food” or even refer to “queasiness or nausea” (though this second meaning is more or less obsolete).

I think such explanations are well intentioned, but, well, ultimately, malarkey.

The cartoonist Thomas Aloysius Dorgan (who signed his toons, “Tad”), can be safely credited with using the word for the first time (with a different spelling, “milarkey”), as far as anyone can tell, in written English in a cartoon from March 23, 1922, in The San Francisco Call & Post, with the caption reading: “Listening To Two Blokes as They Try to Phone in a Joint Without a Booth … Aw, go chase yourself!!!! No, no, not you Central …Yes, Milarkey” (sic.).

Dorgan (1877-1929) was also a sports reporter and was well known and loved for his penchant for coming up with witty, if somewhat nonsensical, expressions, among them, “drug-store cowboy,” “cake-eater” and “the cat’s meow” (along with some lesser-known gems as, “busy as a one-armed paper-hanger with hives” [incidentally, the British slang term for a one-armed bandit is a “fruit machine”]).

Well, I hope that bit on malarkey wasn’t malarkey, as it were; if you have any word ideas or questions, I’d love to hear from you; please send me a note at features@dailyuw.com.