September 3, 2020

The current US President asserts that he is a genius. The American public has failed to acknowledge this, even though his very name is described in J. R. Rosedale’s 1978 Synonym Finder as meaning (verb), excel, surpass. outstrip, outdo, outperform, outwit, drub, (infinitive – a verb taking the role of a noun): wallop, top, best, worst, overpower, overcome, get the better of, better, get the upper hand, prevail, nose out, win and – followed by the word ‘up’ – fabricate, invent, make out of whole cloth, concoct, cook up, hatch create, conceive, frame, devise, scheme, make up, fake, contrive.

More to the point, this genius’ trumpery [a noun], 1. rubbish, trash, riffraff, 2. nonsense, falderal, gibberish, babble, or [an adjective] 3. trifling, trivial, insignificant, immaterial, unimportant, twopenny, two-bit (as slang), or 4. rubbishy, trashy, insignificant, “and so on,” as Kurt Vonnegut would have said.

The British and French weigh in with slang for: twaddle, blather, drivel, gobbledegook, humbug, foam, froth, bunkum – and, not to be outdone by our former colonialists – the US offers slang terms too: schlock, poor, base, mean, commonplace, shoddy, shabby, beggarly, scrubby, wretched, blah, balderdash, hogwash, swill, horsefeathers, stuff, stuff and nonsense, fudge, foolishness. … Read More »