Malarkey: a definition...

Malarkey --speech or writing designed to obscure, mislead or impress-- was one of my dad's favorite words. Any time he doubted the veracity of what Owen or I was saying, he'd cock his head to the side and give us that look: "Ah, you're so full of malarkey it's comin' out your ears," he'd bellow. Malarkey? What is this word that dad keeps using? I wondered. Of course, I understood its meaning from the context of his refrain and especially from his body language -- the sideways look, his hands shooing me away like so much hot air. For the longest time, I thought the word was Irish and that dad had no doubt acquired it from a long line of aunts and uncles, grandmothers and fathers, who liked to tell tall tales and pull each others' legs. But I recently looked up the word and the dictionaries tell me that "malarkey" is an Americanism from the 1920s. Maybe this is a bunch of malarkey, right? Who knows? What are Americanisms anyway except words, like Americans themselves, that come from all over the place. You see, there's a problem of origin here, the idea that something is true because it comes from an original source. Is there ever an original source to anything? Especially when it comes to words and stories?
I've started this blog as a memorial to my dad who understood well the value of storytelling and, equally, the gold in bullshit. My dad loved to tell stories and I, for one, loved to listen to them. I happen to believe that we are actually made of stories --the stories that we tell each other about each other and the stories that we tell ourselves about our "selves." In his last days, when my dad was only a shell of himself and unable to speak, I knew for certain that people are much more that the flesh and bones that they inhabit, the brains housed in their skulls. They are words put together, one after another, making meaning out of this "stuff" called "life," and as long as the stories are alive, then so is the person.
So you see my purpose in starting this blog. It's a memorial in the truest sense of the word. Sit down. Sigh. And tell a story about my dad. Make it long and sour. Make it short and sweet. Fill it with enough malarkey to turn the page brown. Above all, be yourself. And the rest of us will do our best to ignore that stuff comin' out your ears.

--KP, August 30, 2008