If you were to unsuspectingly come across a bunch of nonsense words — say, for example, “’Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe” — you might just call it “balderdash” and continue on your way (possibly keeping a wary eye out for any looming jabberwockies). You’d be in the company of folks from Andrew Marvell from 1674 (“Did ever Divine rattle out such prophane Balderdash!”) to Thomas Carlyle from 1888 (“No end of florid inflated tautologic ornamental balderdash.”)
But if you were to unsuspectingly come across a pail of sudsy dishwater, would you also remark “balderdash,” like Thomas Nash did in 1599? And for that matter, if you saw someone pour two beverages together that normally would never be mixed, you’d be in the company of Ben Johnson, who wrote in 1631 “Beare [beer], and butter-milke, mingled together..It is against my free-hold..To drinke such balder dash.”
“Balderdash” seems like a nonsense word itself, but it’s been around for hundreds of years. It no longer has anything to do with liquid mixtures, frothy or not, but it still means nonsense. Nobody really knows where it came from. But it MIGHT be related to a word that’s completely disappeared from English: “balductum.”
At the time “balderdash” started showing up — that would be in the late 1500s — “balductum” had already been in use for decades. It originally meant a kind of drink — in fact, one that would qualify as balderdash. It was hot milk mixed with beer (sorry about that mental image, but they really did drink that). Its earliest mention was by Thomas Wright, who produced a sort of dictionary in 1450 and explained, not very helpfully, that “balductum” was a “posset.” As sometimes happens, if you try to find out about “posset,” all you’ll see is that it’s an obsolete word meaning hot milk mixed with beer. They thought it was medicine back then — possibly proving that it’s more important thing that a dose of medicine tastes ghastly than that it really cure anything.
“Balductum,” unlike “balderdash,” does have an etymological root. It comes from the Latin word “balducta,” which means “pressed milk” — evidently curd, not to far from cottage cheese. And in a bit of parallel word-evolution, by the late 100s “balductum” meant not only a nasty liquid mixture but also nonsense words. Gabriel Harvey used it in 1593: “The stalest dudgen, or absurdest balductum, that they, or their mates can inuent.” By the way, the title of Harvey’s book is much better than average for the time: “Pierces supererogation, or; A new prayse of the old asse.”
“Balductum” didn’t turn out to have anything close to the staying power of “balderdash;” by the 1600s it was already obsolete. That’s perfectly okay, really, seeing as how we had “balderdash,” which is anyway more fun to say. And “balderdash” is doing just fine, usage-wise. It peaked somewhere around the 1920s, but it’s now holding pretty steady at about the same rate of use it had in the 1800s. I guess it just goes to show, like the old saying, “cows may come and cows may go, but the balderdash around here goes on forever.”
