Ah, the wearin’ of the green. I lay claim to one-quarter Irish blood, which yields the in-group privilege of getting my Irish up when I want to and also provokes delight in Joe Biden’s recent use of the term “malarkey.” Biden has greater rights to Irishisms, being half-Irish; Ryan, who grew up “lace-curtain Irish” according to Irish Central, may have an even greater claim.
But moments after Biden used “malarkey” to describe Paul Ryan’s criticisms of the administration’s handling of the embassy attack in Benghazi, etymologists were weighing in about the origin of the word. Both The Economist and Ben Zimmer at Visual Thesaurus pointed out that malarkey is not so much of Irish as of Irish-American origin, its first cite from 1922. The OED gives the word’s origin as “unknown,” and conjectures have ranged from the Greek word malakia (denoting a particular sort of …