>Carrol wrote:
>
>>It's not all that new. From the OED:
>
>I don't think anybody said it was. I figure Doug knows it from his
>immersion in 19th century American literature.
Actually I picked it up from my late friend Larry Wilkinson, who was a big Mencken fan. He loved to quote Mencken on "all that flapdoodle blowing out of the East" - Eastern religion, that is.
Doug