Tiny little lies.  Lie-kittens, in fact.

Dear Word Detective:  I’ve long heard the word “malarkey” to mean any sort of exaggerated nonsense, but was surprised to find while watching HBO’s “Band of Brothers” that it is also a person’s name.  There are several words that are based on names (fink, quisling, bowdlerize) when some person exemplified a certain quality or activity.  The paratrooper Sgt. Don Malarkey didn’t seem to be known for spouting nonsense, so I guess the origins must go farther back.  An anti-Irish slur, perhaps?  Certainly some of my older Irish-American relatives could spin a good yarn, which may or may not bear resemblance to anything true.– Marty Giles.

Good question.  My mother was fond of “malarkey” (the word) as well as its synonym “guff” (as in “Don’t give me that guff”), which had the convenient (for a mother) secondary meaning of “backtalk.”  The origin of “guff,” interestingly, is “echoic.”  The word was formed in imitation of the sound of a gust of wind, and it originally meant simply “a puff of wind” before it was pressed into service to mean “empty talk” in the late 19th century.

English has lots of eponyms (words formed from proper nouns, especially personal names), and two of the words you mention are indeed eponymous in origin.  “Quisling,” today used to mean a traitor, especially a collaborator with an enemy occupation force, comes from the name of Major Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian army officer and diplomat who collaborated with the Nazi forces occupying Norway during World War II.  “Bowdlerize,” today meaning to expurgate or censor a book or other creative work, immortalizes Dr. Thomas Bowdler, who in 1818 produced what he called “The Family Shakespeare,” from which he had carefully excised whatever of the Bard’s words he deemed unfit for consumption by women and children.

“Fink,” however, is not an eponym and, despite what you may have read, has no connection either to the legendary river boat captain Mike Fink or the Pinkerton Detective Agency.  Literally meaning “finch” in German, “fink” comes from German university students’ slang for an outsider or loner, what today we would call a “nerd” or “weirdo.”  In the US, it originally meant “an unreliable person” in the late 19th century, but later came to mean “a strikebreaker or informer.”

As for for the origin of “malarkey,” unfortunately, your guess is as good as mine, or as good as the guess of any of the etymologists who have been arguing about the word since it first appeared in print in the 1920s (thereby ruling out “Band of Brothers” as a source).  “Malarkey” (or “Malarky”) does exist as an Irish surname, so the term may well derive from one such “Malarkey” who became famous for tricking or defrauding people.  If so, however, his crimes must have been rather mild, for “malarkey” is a fairly gentle word, usually applied to fibs rather than felonies.

For whom the clinker clanks.

Dear Word Detective: I’ve pondered the question and I’ve done a little research on the internet only to find conflicting opinions on the subject. So I write to you, the master, to give me an answer to the question. Is it “all told” or “all tolled”? Even newspapers frustrate me on this one (not that they don’t frustrate me with their news as well). — L. Fiske.

Master, eh? So how come I can’t get my own dogs to do simple things, such as mowing the lawn? All they’re willing to do is wash dishes, and the plates smell funny afterward.

But since we seem to be in the mood for a pronouncement, here it is: the standard idiom is “all told,” not “all tolled,” and has been since it first appeared in the mid-19th century. What you have stumbled upon is a classic “eggcorn,” the substitution of a word or words that sound similar (or in this case exactly the same, “tolled” and “told” being homophones) to the “correct” words. The term “eggcorn” was coined in 2003 by linguist Geoffrey Pullum in regard to someone online using “eggcorn” instead of “acorn.” The key feature of an “eggcorn” is that the substitution makes a certain weird sense, as in the case of “eggcorn” itself. An acorn is indeed rather egg-shaped, and is a seed, as is corn, so if one has heard “acorn,” but never seen the word in print, writing it as “eggcorn” is not entirely crazy. The substitution of “for all intensive purposes” for “intents and purposes” is another semi-logical classic eggcorn.

“All tolled” is not only an eggcorn for “all told,” it’s apparently one that some people (according to the excellent Eggcorn Database) are willing to defend as the “correct” form. Their argument is that “tolled” means “added up,” which it does not and never has. “To toll” (of which “tolled” is the past tense) means “to ring a bell,” or (rarely) “to demand a tax or charge” (as at a toll booth). The noun “toll” means “tax, charge or levy.” The use of “toll” in “death toll” and similar phrases as a metaphorical equivalent of “price” does not mean that “to toll” means “to sum up.”

“All told,” on the other hand, does sound a bit odd. At first glance, “all told” seems to imply that whatever is being summed up is a sort of story being narrated or “told,” and when the story-telling is finished one says “all told,” a weirdly abrupt equivalent of “game over.”

But “tell” (of which “told” is the past tense) didn’t originally mean “to narrate.” Rooted in the Old English “tellen,” it meant “to count” or “to keep track of,” a sense we still use when we “tell time” and which underlies the word “teller,” a person who keeps track of money in a bank. “All told” embodies this archaic sense of “tell” in the past tense to mean “all counted and added up, in summation.” So “all told” can be properly used in a numerical sense (”All told, twelve football players were arrested”) as well as a more figurative sense of “the end result” (”All told, it was a pretty successful day”). Interestingly, the evolution of “to tell” from meaning “to count” to meaning “to narrate a story” is paralleled by another common word, “recount” (as well as “account” for the story itself).

It was the late Lord Wobbly’s favourite colour.

Dear Word Detective: I can´t find the meaning of the phrase “steady the Buffs.” It occurs in the play “An Inspector Call” by J.B. Priestley, but I’ve looked it up in many reference books and it was a waste of time. If you can find the meaning for me, I would appreciate it very much. — Mabel Susana Galinanes, Argentina.

A waste of time? Oh, I beg to differ. Searching through reference books may not produce the answer to your particular question, but one almost always learns something in the process, even if it’s only the specific gravity of tuna salad or how to hypnotize a wildebeest. And you never know when you may need to know how to tie a half-over whiptailed hitch knot. Granted, that’s not very likely since I just made that up and can barely tie my own shoes. But I do know how to start a stalled car using only a credit card and a cell phone.

I have never read Mr. Priestley’s play, but from summaries I gather it is set in 1912 (although it was written in 1945) at an upper-class family dinner interrupted by the visit of a inspector (perhaps from the police; perhaps, he said ominously, not) inquiring about the death of a local working-class girl. The use of the phrase “steady the Buffs” in the play is apparently one of many not-very-subtle signals that these are indeed prosperous folk.

“Steady the Buffs” is a catchphrase meaning “stay calm, be careful, and persevere,” an expression of encouragement offered to someone in trying circumstances. The phrase itself dates back at least to the late 19th century, when it was popularized by Rudyard Kipling in his short story collection “Soldiers Three.” “Steady” in the phrase is the well-known nautical command, meaning “steer steady,” i.e., maintain the current course and speed.

The “Buffs” takes a bit more explaining. It’s capitalized in the phrase because “the Buffs” is the nickname of the East Kent Regiment of the British Army, a famous unit that dates back to the 16th century. The regiment’s nickname refers to their uniform jackets in the 19th century, which sported facings (trim on the collars, cuffs, etc.) of a “buff,” or light yellowish-tan, color. “Buff” as the name of a color comes from the tanned hides of buffalo (the Asian sort, not the American bison) used as outerwear; “buff” meaning “enthusiast” comes from “fire buffs” in 19th century America, volunteer firefighters (or just wannabe firefighters) who wore such coats to conflagrations.

The exact origin and logic of the phrase “steady the Buffs” is a bit unclear, although given the illustrious history of the unit there is no lack of stories set in pitched battle against an implacable foe in which a commander encouraged his men with the phrase. After Kipling popularized it, it became a common way to say “carry on and don’t panic,” especially among the upper classes.