Gobbledygook
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Gobbledygook or gobbledegook (sometimes abbreviated to gobbledegoo) is an English term used to describe nonsensical language, sound that resembles language but has no meaning, or encrypted text. It also means official, professional or pretentious verbiage. Plain language advocates use the term to mean that something is being expressed in an overly complicated manner. Gobbledygook does not carry connotations of foreignness. It refers to inherently baffling material.
The term was coined on March 30, 1944 by Maury Maverick, chairman of the United States Smaller War Plants Corporation. In a memo banning "gobbledygook language", he wrote "anyone using the words activation or implementation will be shot". [1] Maverick later used the word in the New York Times Magazine on May 21, 1944 as part of a further complaint against the obscure language used by his colleagues. His inspiration, he said, was the turkey, "always gobbledy gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity. At the end of his gobble, there was a sort of gook.".
Apparently he became tired of going to meetings where people rambled on about "maladjustments co-extensive with the problem areas" and "alternative but nevertheless meaningful minimae"<i>.
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Examples
The following are notable quotations. Emphasis has been added in each example.
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." [2]
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." [3]
The television series Doctor Who includes the following exchange:
- Leela: Within the black wall wherein lies paradise.
- The Doctor: Is that just religious gobbledygook or is that an actual place? [4]
Actor Tom Baker comments in his autobiography about the technical babble often scripted for his most famous character:
- "Playing Doctor Who came as a great surprise to me. I had no idea that I would enjoy it so much. All that was required of me was to be able to speak complete gobbledygook with conviction." [5]
The Plain English Campaign is an independent organization founded in 1979 to promote good communication. Their site 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.'"[6]
The Plain English Campaign website also offers a gobbledygook generator, sarcastically suggesting that this can give anyone the prose style of a professional consultant. [7]
In popular culture
J.K. Rowling makes "Gobbledygook" the language of goblins in the Harry Potter novels.
This word has been voted as one of the ten English words that were hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company.
Incidental remarks
The Finnish equivalent, kapulakieli, means very artificial and overly complicated language full of foreign loans, especially judicial or technical text, which is almost impossible to understand for a layman, and produces difficulties even for professionals. Pekoraali refers to language which follows the rules of the linguistics and where the words are grammatically correct, but have no meaning besides being mere queues of phonemes. It refers to Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky.