Maliarlum

“Maliarlum” is apparently the 1940s Singlish word for “Malayalam”. See Rage in Singapore, David George Kin, Wisdom House, 1942, p. 214 et altra. With this post I get Google ownership of the word.

UPDATE:

Google found my post within a minute or so. They had already recognized “Maliarlum” as a misspelling of “Malayalam”, though.

I have sent an inquiry to A Dictionary of Singlish about the status of this word, which neither they nor Coxford lists. It might be obsolete, and perhaps it was only used by expat colonials.

My guess is that this particular misspelling  is that of someone speaking some rhotic dialect of British English that puts Rs where,  as far as I am concerned, they don’t really belong .

 

A Forgotten and Not Very Good Author

Sometime later I will publish my definitive study of the works of David George Plotkin / Kin,  a forgotten minor author whose last book was published sometime between 1958 and 1968. His two most famous works were forgeries, and  two or three of the others were scurrilous smears. Not a very good writer, really, but he did succeed in mixing it up and keeping things interesting.

Key words: poetry, American Jews, Brownsville, Elias Lieberman, Thomas Seltzer, Otto Soglow, The Great Depression, cartoons, Pascal Covici, The Fall of Singapore, World War Two, Friedrich Nietzsche, forgery, Samuel Roth, Burton K. Wheeler, Philip Roth, scurrilous smear job, Communists, Maxwell Bodenheim, Greenwich Village, lesbians, Merrill’s Marauders, maxims, proverbs, pornography.

The Works of David Plotkin / Kin

David George Plotkin (introduction by Elias Lieberman) , Ghetto Gutters,  Thomas Seltzer, 1926. (Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  review of Ghetto Gutters /Braithwaite, Anthology of Magazine Verse, review of Ghetto Gutters / Poetry: A Magazine of Verse mentions Plotkin / a poem by Lieberman / Thomas Seltzer, publisher / Albert and Charles Boni, Seltzer’s nephews who revived his publishing company).

Otto Soglow (cartoonist) and David George Plotkin, Wasn’t the Depression Terrible?, Covici Friede, 1934. (Book cover  / Time Magazine review / Pascal Covici, publisher.)

David George Kin, Rage in Singapore,  Wisdom House, 1942.

Pseudo-Friedrich Nietzsche (forged by David George Kin), My Sister and I, Boar’s Head Books, 1951. (Kin’s confession /  Samuel Roth, publisher /  Some still take My Sister and I  at face value / Dennis Dutton on My Sister and I / Hollingsdale review / Disputed Nietzsche I II  III / Kathleen Winiger, “The Disputed Nietzsche: My Sister and I, by Friedrich Nietzsche”: Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Critical Thought. No. 91. Spring, 1992, pp. 185-189.)

David George Kin, The Plot Against America,  John E. Kennedy Publishers, 1946. (Commissioned as a smear on Sen. Burton K. Wheeler /  Kin’s book was investigated by Congress / Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America)

Maxwell Bodenheim (“edited” and probably mostly written by David Kin), My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village, Bridgehead Books,  1954. (Kin and the Bodenheim autobiography / Maxwell Bodenheim)

David Kin (preface by J. Donald Adams), Dictionary of American Maxims, Philosophical Library, 1955.

David Kin (preface by Mark Van Doren), Dictionary of American Proverbs, Philosophical Library, 1955.

David George Plotkin, Women Without Men: True Stories about Lesbian Love in Greenwich Village, Brookwood Publishing Company, 1958. (This may be the same book under the pseudonym Noel O’Hara.  Similar misogynist, homophobic books from Manhattan: Loathsome Women / Why Men Rule )