'Little or No True Value'

Just as songs and commercial jingles randomly enter my consciousness, without me having heard them, some dating back sixty years or more, so too do words. Friday’s irritant was flummery. I thought I might have remembered it from Shakespeare but I was wrong. I vaguely recalled that it meant nonsense, bloviation, bullshit. That led me to check H.L. Mencken. It would seem to have been coined for him. I found it. In Prejudices: Fourth Series (1924), describing Rotary (a frequent Mencken target) and other civic and fraternal organizations, and the titles, rituals, and costumes members wear, he refers to “self-deceptive flummery.” He uses it several other times. Next I checked the OED. It has an unlikely origin and entered English early in the seventeenth century from the Welsh. It meant: “A dish made by soaking ground oats or other grains in water and then boiling them to form a gelatinous semi-solid porridge.” You can hear the modern metaphorical meaning bubbling. In the following…

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