Ridiculous words

We like ridiculous words for ridiculous ideas, just as we prefer beautiful words for beautiful ideas, beautiful things and beautiful people. Ridiculous is itself a ridiculous word, at least in comparison with more standard words such as nonsense and untruth, which simply mean the opposite of sense and truth.

There are an amazing number of colorful words to describe nonsense, some of them very old and others relatively new. You may have even made up your own such word on the spot. Even if you have never heard these words before, you know immediately what they mean because they sound so ridiculous. Here I present a sampling of such words. There may be hundreds more.

balderdash, poppycock, flapdoodle, tomfoolery, prattle, blather, drivel, twaddle, bosh, horsefeathers, gibberish, hogwash, piffle,  tommyrot, claptrap, humbuggery, fiddlesticks, malarky, hooey, codswallop, blarney, crapola, humbug, hoodoo, kookiness, hokeypokey and tarradiddle.

And then there are all those words that mean something else but have been borrowed to refer to something ridiculous or simply wrong: gas, moonshine, applesauce, hot air, rot, rubbish, garbage, beans, bilge, drool, garbage and nuts, among others.

Sometimes the best putdown of a ridiculous idea is to ridicule it, and we can do that easily with whatever word we choose to label it.