Gobbledygook

For the Sigur Rós song, see Gobbledigook (song).

Gobbledygook or gobbledegook (sometimes gobbledegoo) is any text containing jargon or especially convoluted English that results in it being excessively hard to understand or even incomprehensible. "Bureaucratese" is one form of gobbledygook. There are two distinct and opposite cases. One is that incomprehensible material is actual gibberish. In the other some abtruse material is either ineptly presented or is subjectively perceived to be gibberish due to a lack of preparation. The SMOG statistic for gobbledygook for example yields an index in terms of years of required education.

Etymology

According to Michael Quinion on his World Wide Words website the word was first coined on 21 May 1944 by Maury Maverick, a congressman from Texas. His comments, recorded in the New York Times Magazine, were made when Maverick was the Democratic chairman of the US Congress Smaller War Plants Committee. He was being critical of the obscure language used by other committee members. The allusion was to a turkey, “always gobbledy gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity”. It is sometimes abbreviated slightly to gobbledygoo.

Notable usage examples in politics

Watergate

Nixon's Oval Office tape from June 14 shows H. R. Haldeman describing the situation to Nixon.

"To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it's wrong, and the President can be wrong."

Reagan's tax revisions

Former United States President Ronald Reagan explained tax law revisions in an address to the nation, 28 May 1985:

"Most (tax revisions) didn’t improve the system, they made it more like Washington itself: complicated, unfair, cluttered with gobbledygook and loopholes designed for those with the power and influence to hire high-priced legal and tax advisers."

Michael Shanks

Michael Shanks, former chairman to the National Consumer Council of Great Britain, characterizes professional gobbledygook as sloppy jargon intended to confuse nonspecialists:

"Gobbledygook may indicate a failure to think clearly, a contempt for one's clients, or more probably a mixture of both. A system that can't or won't communicate is not a safe basis for a democracy."

Cultural influence

The word has been used anachronistically in fiction set before the invention of the term. For example, in the British sitcom Blackadder Goes Forth, set in 1917 (27 years before the word was first used), the character General Melchett declares that he likes the term and wants to "use it more often in conversation". In another British series, Robin Hood, set in the beginning of the 15th century, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Vaisey, uses the term to refer to Latin, in those days commonly used in the church. In the film The Green Mile, character Paul Edgecombe replies to his wife Jan, "Oh, you know doctors - gobbledygook mostly." The film version of The Green Mile is set in 1935, 9 years before the word's creation.

In the film Carry On Regardless, the landlord to the Helping Hands offices (played by Stanley Unwin) speaks in gobbledygook, causing a misunderstanding until one of the Helping Hands meets him and can translate.

In the "How to Irritate People" airplane sketch by Monty Python, gobbledygook is used as a way of frightening passengers in an airplane.

Former Irish tennis star Bryan Crowley when describing his chat with the two Danish heroes abroad in San Luis Obispo :"Them Danish lads have perfect English, but when they speak their own language it sounds like a haype of Gobblydegook."

The term has also been used as a name for various fictional characters, albums, etc. In the video game Final Fantasy VI there is an enemy named Gobbledygook. The British children's show Alphabet Castle has a character called Gobbledygook the turkey, who always gets his words and letters jumbled up. Gobbledegook was a goblin comic character semi-regularly appearing in his own column in the fantasy gaming magazine White Dwarf until about issue 100. In a similar vein, the "Harry Potter" series names Gobbledegook as the language of the stories' version of goblins. "The Gobbledy Gooker" was a character in the World Wrestling Federation's Survivor Series, who "hatched" from an egg and then proceeded to dance with the announcer in the ring; widely considered one of the worst gimmicks created by wrestling fans, it inspired the now-annual WrestleCrap Award for worst gimmick of the year. "Gobbledigook" is also the first single from Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós's album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust.

From 1973 to 1977, actor Whitman Mayo portrayed Grady Wilson on the NBC television classic, Sanford and Son. Whenever Grady was at a loss for words, he would exclaim, "Good Gobbledygook."

During World War Two Eleanora Wenz Anderson while working as an illustrator in California designed a character to illustrate the term. The character resembled a caricature of Woody Woodpecker with an exaggerated top knot.

A Progressive Insurance commercial in the United States contains the word "gobbledygook."

Other terms

In English, other common idioms indicating difficulty in understanding complicated language are: "It is all Greek to me" or "talking double Dutch ". For complicated written language, a common expression is that something is "written in hieroglyphics". Bafflegab is a synonym.

In the midwestern region of the United States, it is also the name for a popular breakfast dish made up of eggs, bacon, and buttered toast mixed in a bowl together and served with toast on the side.^{[citation needed]}

Similar notions in other languages

• In Turkish, the speaker says "Bu konuya Fransız kaldım." (I remained French against this topic.) when he or she doesn't possibly understand the topic.
• The Finnish corresponding term is kapulakieli (cudgel language), referring to haughty, high-spirited and unintelligible office language.
• In French, the slang word for gobbledygook is "le charabia". It is used informally in conversations.
• Germans call it "technical Chinese" (Fachchinesisch).
• In Spanish, you can say "hablar en chino" (speaking Chinese).
• In Greek, when one talks with nonsensical, specialized or generally uncommon word choices, he is said to speak in Arabic ("Alhambranese") (αλαμπουρνέζικα, alambournezika). The equivalent phrase to the English "It's all Greek to me!" is "You're speaking Chinese (κινέζικα, ki'nezika)!" In Norwegian, one can also say that incomprehensible language "sounds like Greek to me" (det er gresk for meg).
• In Hungarian, the term "it's Chinese for me" (nekem ez kínai) is used if the listener/reader cannot catch the meaning (especially when dealing with technical, legal or office texts). Another term for talks which are gibberish, or are composed grammatically correctly but are flooded with words hard/impossible to understand, is halandzsa (which is a meaningless word created for meaningful-sounding but actually meaningless talk). For the complicated bureaucracy language, the term "beech tree language" (bikkfanyelv) is used but mostly in literary or elaborated contexts.
• In Italian, the term used is "to speak Arabic" (parlare arabo). "Politichese" (political jargon) and "Burocratese" (bureaucracy jargon) are also widely used. The term "supercazzola" can be used too; it comes from the movie Amici miei, where it refers to a prank consisting of a series of meaningless, fast-spoken phrases; the word itself is meaningless.
• Portuguese speakers describe a person speaking incomprehensibly as talking Greek (estou a falar grego?), Latin (isto para mim é latim) or Chinese (eu falei chinês?).
• Three similar-meaning words appear in Russian: "Beliberda" (Белиберда), "Tarabarshchina" (Тарабарщина) and "Abracadabra" (Абракадабра). Grammatically, they work in a similar way to a language, and refer to nonsense talk. In addition, the phrase "kitaiskaya gramota" (Китайская грамота, "Chinese writing") is used.
• In colloquial Arabic, when someone talks that way he is referred as "speaking in Indian". In Levantine Arabic dialects and some other Arabic dialects, people explicitly refer to Sanskrit as a "non-sense language".

See also

• Jargon
• Legalese
• Mojibake — Random nonsense characters generated by foreign text
• Malarchaeology
• Newspeak
• Nonsense
• Simlish
• SMOG (Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook)
• Sokal affair
• Stanley Unwin (comedian)
• Technobabble

External links

• The UN Fund for Gobbledygook
• Gobblygook generator