DEAR RICHARD LEDERER: I was gobsmacked (a fun word too) to hear for the first time the word bafflegab, which means exactly what it sounds like. Unfortunately, there’s so much of it these days. –Cindy Veinot, Chicago
Bafflegab, which entered American English in 1952, does indeed mean “unintelligible jargon.” Words that describe words that befuddle and obfuscate possess some of the most fascinating etymologies in the English language:
- The word balderdash reaches back to the time of William Shakespeare and originally meant “a hodge-podge of liquids,” such as milk mixed with beer, beer with wine, and brandy with mineral water. Gradually, balderdash came to stand for “pretentious, bombastic, and senseless prose.”
- And, of course — bwa ha ha! — balderdash can also mean “a rapidly receding hairline.” (Some men exhibit a receding hairline. I call it an advancing headline.)
- Double Dutch is a Briticism that denotes a meaningless jumble of sounds. We say, “It’s Greek to me,” but the English loved to pick on the Dutch with such expressions as “Dutch treat” (no treat at all), “Dutch courage” (alcohol) and “in Dutch” (in trouble). From the Dutch pappekak we also get poppycock, literally “soft poop” or “baby poop.”
- Flapdoodle is an American southernism. When you cook and then remove a bunch of pancakes (“flaps”) from a cast-iron skillet that has not been properly seasoned, the designs (“doodles”) are left at the bottom of the pan. Thus, the complaint from Confederate troops: “If it wasn’t for those damn Yankees making such a flapdoodle out of nothing, we’d be eating honey and homemade biscuits right now.”
- gibberish. In Julius Caesar (1604), Shakespeare wrote, “The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.” As the sound of gibber indicates, the verb means “to utter incomprehensible prattle.” From to gibber we get the verb to jabber (whence Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky”) and the noun gibberish.
- gobbledygook. Back in 1942, a blackout order came across the desk of President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Such preparations shall be made as will completely obscure all Federal buildings and non-Federal buildings occupied by the Federal government during an air raid for any period of time from visibility of internal or external illumination.” Roosevelt fired back: “Tell them that in buildings where they have to keep the work going to put something across the windows.”
Inflated and abstract writing such as that 1942 blackout order is called gobbledygook. The word was cobbled by one-time Texas congressman Maury Maverick, who compared the forbidding prose of Washington bureaucrats to the senseless gobbling of turkeys that echoes in the public mindspace. Gobbledygook, according to semanticist Stuart Chase, means “using two or three or 10 words in the place of one, or using a five-syllable word where a single syllable would suffice. Gobbledygook doesn’t call a spade a spade. Gobbledygook calls a spade “a manual excavation device.” That’s why the one-syllable, three-letter word now has been replaced by the five-word, 17-letter “at this point in time.” Lest we forget, it is language that separates the human beings from the bureaucrats.
Finally, I shine the spotlight on three rhyming reduplications that signify meaningless prattle:
- Picture a medieval minstrel singing a ballad. He makes it up as he goes along, but every now and then his inspiration fails him. Rather than commit the faux pas of silence, he or she sings something like “fol-de-rol,” the medieval equivalent of “la-la-la.” In the late 17th century folderol, a nonsense word, came to mean “nonsense words.”
- Hocus-pocus is said to issue from the Latin hoc est corpus meum — “this is my body” — from the Roman Catholic mass. From hocus has issued the words hoax, “a mischievous trick,” and hokum, “nonsense.”
- Mumbo-jumbo was originally a Mandingo word that denoted a magician who made the troubled spirits of ancestors go away.
In truth, one could compile an entire book of “stuff and nonsense” words — bafflegab, baloney, blarney, blatherskite, bosh, bunk, cockamamie, claptrap, cock-and-bull story, codswallop, doublespeak, fiddle-faddle, flimflam, gobbledygook, hogwash, hooey, humbug, legalese, malarkey, piffle, twaddle, and tommyrot. That so many people have been able to come up with so many words to identify and describe nonsensical, insincere, and misleading language shows that there is still hope that one day we may create a pollution-free verbal environment.