After telling the dog to “cut out the malarky,” a word from my ancient past seldom encountered since the passing of my father, I wondered about its origin.
Greene’s Dictionary of Slang stated that it means “nonsense, foolishness, ‘messing about’” with its first mention coming from Australia in 1894 in reference to a “Captain Mullurky” by his senior officer, one Captain Stack, who considered it a “melodious name” for “a military muddle apparently perpetrated as a lark,” for which Mullurky seems to have had a reputation. Greene’s further stipulated that malarky next sprang up in the U.S. in 1930 and meant “false story,” and a check of Google’s n-gram viewer, which shows the popularity of English words over time, proved that malarky’s American popularity indeed emerged in 1930 and peaked in the 1950s and 60s. The Online Etymology Dictionary added that “another slang term meaning much the same thing at about the same time in U.S. was ackamarackus (1934).”
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