Throughout the seventeenth century, the word balderdash referred to any drink made by jumbling together liquids that should not, in a sane universe, occupy the same glass, much less the same stomach: beer and butter-milk, beer and wine, wine and milk\u2014all are forms of balderdash. This now-obsolete sense of balderdash is clearly connected with the one current today: namely a senseless jumble of words. This “jumbled words” sense may, in fact, have been the original meaning of balderdash, a meaning that did not appear in written English until the late seventeenth century, probably because it was considered too vulgar for print. In spoken English, however, balderdash likely appeared in the sixteenth century or earlier as a slang compound made by combining balder (a dialect word meaning to use coarse language) and dash (a word of Norse origin meaning to smack together). Alternatively, balderdash may have derived from the Welsh baldorddus, meaning idle talk, or even from the Medieval Latin balducta, denoting a drink of hot milk curdled with wine.<\/p>\n
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Throughout the seventeenth century, the word balderdash referred to any drink made by jumbling together liquids that should not, in a sane universe, occupy the same glass, much less the same stomach: beer and butter-milk, beer and wine, wine and milk\u2014all are forms of balderdash. This now-obsolete sense of balderdash is clearly connected with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-b"],"yoast_head":"\n