A Better Word for Malarkey

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant and Martha. This is Jenny from Portland, Oregon.

Hiya, Jenny. What’s up?

Well, I have a problem. It seems like there’s kind of a hole in the English language. I’ve been in a situation where I needed a noun to describe something that was fake or made up, and there are a lot of words for that, but none of them seem natural to me.

What were you talking about? What was the thing that was fake or made up?

In this situation, it was in dental school in our cafeteria. There were a new series of drinks, and they’re supposed to give you different powers. Like one was supposed to make you happy, and one was supposed to make you sleepy, and one was supposed to make you sexy. And someone asked you what my opinion of it was. And I was like, it sounds like something to me, and I couldn’t think of that something what that word should be.

To me, there’s one obvious word that would go in there that’s not radio-friendly, but I also prefer not to swear. It just seems a little aggressive. And then I looked it up in the thesaurus later. I was trying to find something else that would work in that situation, but all the words just sounded like they belonged, like they were coming out of the mouth of a grandpa. It was like poppycock and malarkey and flim flam, and none of that sounds right to me either. So I’m wondering if I’m missing a word that exists or if I just need to embrace my inner grandpa and go with one of those words.

I like all those words. What does it say about me?

Embrace your inner grand.

So they didn’t give you the powers that they said they were going to give you?

Well, I didn’t try them, but someone asked what I thought of them. That was what I thought.

You missed your opportunity.

So the modern slang word janky, does that work?

To me, something that’s janky means that it’s like falling apart or poorly made.

Okay, so no. It’s just, you know, there’s claims being made about it that aren’t true.

So what about, okay, so fraud or fake or hoax and none of those really worked for you?

Kind of. Kind of. For fraud, maybe the closest thing. I feel like those all have little sort of tweaks to their meaning that don’t exactly capture what I’m going for. The way that, like, poppycock really does capture what I mean, but I just don’t feel comfortable using poppycock as a 20-year-old.

You should do it.

No, but you should.

Yeah.

Would it help if you knew it came from Dutch words that mean soft poop?

Maybe that would help. I will tell you, Jenny, the one word that I think works best here. However, it’s a little kind of a feat, maybe literary even, is the word chicanery.

But you’re going to sound pretentious if you use it.

It doesn’t sound quite so grandpa-ish. You hear me? You’re going to sound pretentious if you use it, though.

Yeah. I think I ended up saying BS. Just saying not the whole word, but saying BS. And I don’t love it, but that was what I ended up using that day. So I feel like situation to situation, you could choose between those two.

That might work. What about sham or bunk or bogus or rubbish?

I can take another look at the source. Some of those are not so bad. Rubbish sounds a little grandpa-y. Bogus sounds a little, I don’t know, 80s.

How dare you say that about me?

I don’t know. Bogus. You have to say it like that, right? Bogus.

That’s a really interesting question, actually. So we want something that’s more age-appropriate for you. Apparently, we’re not giving you age-appropriate ideas. But I want to get to this. I think there might have been some good ones in there. I just feel like these words that mean this seem to be kind of loaded with more meaning than, you know, that they belong to a certain time period or something like that than a lot of words.

What about something more general like crap? Is that too close to obscenity for you?

It’s not too bad. That might work in some situations too. I’ll add that to my list of possible words.

Well, I think, Jenny, this is clearly one of those calls where we have to put the call out to our listeners and see what they have to suggest for you.

All right. So here’s the call out. If you know the word that Jenny should use to describe something, a noun preferably, where they’re making claims about a product that cannot be substantiated, then we want to know. And so does Jenny. Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

How’s that, Jenny?

I think that’ll be good. We’ll find out.

Okay, we’re going to crowdsource it. Take care.

All right, thank you.

Thanks, Jenny.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.