No malarkey? Biden's old-school slogan gets mocked and praised in Iowa

The heyday of “malarkey” on the pages of The Post came in the 1980s. There were a few little bursts before, including in the late 1800s, when Washington Senators pitcher John Malarkey was racking up a grim 2-10 record over three seasons. In the 1940s, Western High School slugger Jack Malarkey got fairly regular write-ups in the paper. By the 1980s, though, the word’s appearances were mostly of the sort that Biden would appreciate. By the 2000s, the popularity of the word had died again.

Google’s extensive index of books allows us to see how the popularity of words evolves over time. Its Ngram tool shows the frequency of words as a percentage of all words from books published in a particular year.

That data shows that use of “malarkey” spiked in books in the 1980s, just as it did in The Post. Interestingly, “malarkey” seems to have edged out “malarky,” with the latter spelling dying out from the 1960s on, as use of the former continued to gain steam. There’s a slight drop-off beginning about 2004; the Google Books data only goes through 2008.

that he should have been speaking to them in preparation for an election eight years later is ridiculous. And hilarious.

TwilightZone

22. They vote at half the rate of the "old ladies" that you summarily dismiss.
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And Biden wasn't targeting 10-year-olds in that debate. The assertion that he should have been speaking to them in preparation for an election eight years later is ridiculous. And hilarious.

Former vice president Joe Biden is aggressively and self-consciously the following things, in no particular order: Irish American, older, a regular guy. Were those traits structured into a Venn diagram, there would be few better words to sit at the center where all three meet than a single word: Malarkey.

Biden loves the word malarkey, so much so that it didn’t take much for me to dig into The Washington Post’s video archive to find this compilation of times that Biden has referred to things using the term. Asked what, exactly, the word meant during the 2012 vice presidential debate, he said that it meant “stuff,” which was his older, regular guy way of saying that it meant BS (which is itself a Post way of saying a particular expletive).....

Cultural phenomenons recur in a cyclical fashion, though the duration of those cycles isn’t constant. It seems feasible that the 1980s brought nostalgia for a term that had emerged 30-plus years earlier — and that Biden is single-handedly powering a renaissance another 30-plus years on. “Malarkey” may be doing for Biden what “Make America Great Again” did for Trump on a smaller scale in evoking the era of President Ronald Reagan.

Most of his embrace of the term is about branding, reinforcing his political identity, and the traits we identified at the beginning of the article. He’s the guy who called Republican ideas “malarkey” and he’s the guy who uses terms like “malarkey” because he’s old and centered and willing to use normal-guy terms like “malarkey” even if that is abnormal.

There’s a corniness to it that is on-brand for Biden. It’s the sort of thing that seems like it could appeal to older voters (and older white voters) more than anyone else. That’s a group that makes up a large chunk of the population, if only a smaller part of the Democratic primary electorate. (Biden’s distinctive strength in the primary is among black Democratic voters.)