Did you know that Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge are blatherskites? They proved it this week by unleashing a hopeless stop-loss campaign against Gwen Ifill, the moderator of tomorrow’s Vice Presidential Candidates debate. If they can discredit the moderator, the thinking goes, then they can diminish the embarrassment Sarah Palin will suffer due to her shallow incompetence and overweening ambition and pride.
What’s left but to laugh at their trivial attempts to rile up the ditto-heads in the rapidly shrinking echo chambers of Jesusland intolerance, hatred, and fear?
From World Wide Words….
BLATHERSKITE/ˈblæðəskʌɪt/
A noisy talker of blatant rubbish; foolish talk or nonsense.This is actually a Scots word, really a pair of words, known from the seventeenth century on. These days, though, it’s more American than either British or Scots. That came about through one of those curious accidents of linguistic history that make the study of etymology such fun.
Both halves of the word seem to be from Old Norse. Blether is a Scots word meaning loquacious claptrap, which comes from Old Norse blathra, to talk nonsense; it exists in various forms now, such as blather or blither (if you call someone a blithering idiot, as people in Britain often did in my youth, you’re using the same word, though most of the meaning had by then been leached out of it). Skate (skite, as Australians and New Zealanders will know it) is more problematic, but is the Scots word for a person held in contempt because of his boasting, which may derive from an Old Norse word meaning to shoot (and, if true, is probably the origin of the American skeet, as in skeet shooting, so that phrase actually means “shoot shootingâ€).
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