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.

The Plain English Campaign FAQ includes the following explanation:

"What's wrong with gobbledygook? We can't put it any better than a nurse who wrote about a baffling memo. She said that 'receiving information in this form makes us feel hoodwinked, inferior, definitely frustrated and angry, and it causes a divide between us and the writer.'"

Etymology

Gobbledygook - pronunciation of the term in US English

The term gobbledygook was coined by former US Representative Maury Maverick, then working for the Smaller War Plants Corporation, in a March 30, 1944 memo banning "gobbledygook language". It was a reaction to his frustration with the "convoluted language of bureaucrats." He made up the word as an onomatopoeic imitation of a turkey's gobble.

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 "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.

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.

In the Harry Potter books, Gobblededygook is said to be the language used by Goblins.

In 'Queen Alice', the tenth chapter of Lewis Carroll's follow-up to 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland', titled 'Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There', The Red Queen asks Alice to translate the word Fiddle-dee-dee into French (which you can see below), but ultimately never manages to do so.

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 states of the U.S. 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.

Similar notions in other languages

• 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 "professional chinese" (Fachchinesisch).
• 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 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.

See also

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

External links

• The UN Fund for Gobbledygook
• Gobblygook generator
• "Global Shred Homepage". Global Shred. Retrieved 2008-02-05.