BALDERDASH

Balderdash (n.) a rapidly receding hairline

What’s so funny about this? Let’s start with the actual definition of the word because you may not have heard of it. It’s kind of outdated and hardly used anymore but it’s still in the dictionary and many people have a passive knowledge of it. “Balderdash” means nonsense, something ridiculous, senseless talk. It can be a euphemism for “bullshit”, but not in the excremental sense. The word itself goes back to the 16th century and was originally the name of a frothy liquid and later a mix of unappetizing drinks. You can see how the word morphed into it present meaning. I suspect that its euphemistic meaning is more of an onomatopoeia, that is, it vaguely sounds like bullshit because of the initial B and the later SH sounds. But this is a joke based on creating a neologistic definition of balderdash. Let’s examine the components. We have “balder”, a comparative of “bald”; and we have dash which can be a noun or a verb. In this case, it will sui