Gobbles

While heading a government office in the mid-1940s, the former Texas congressman grew weary of the inflated verbiage he confronted daily among the many bureaucrats who had flocked to Washington during World War II. What to call their windy rhetoric? As Maverick later recalled in a New York Times article, it reminded him of “the old bearded turkey gobbler back in Texas who was always gobbledygobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity. At the end of his gobble there was a sort of gook.” Maverick had his word. In a memo he advised staff members to “stay off the gobbledygook language,” which he defined as “talk or writing which is long, pompous, vague, involved, usually with Latinized words.” The Texan’s coinage quickly wended its way into the national vocabulary, where it has remained ever since. (Maverick’s origin story may have been a bit disingenuous. In his time gobbledygoo was slang for fellatio.)

Gobbledygook passed what linguist Allan Metcalf considers the acid test of a successful neologism: to remain in widespread use for at least two generations. In his thoughtful book Predicting New Words, Metcalf suggests several criteria that indicate whether a neologism is likely to pass this test. They include: diversity of users, frequency of use, and unobtrusiveness. I would add that good harmonics are nearly always a virtue (blurb), as is vivid imagery (fiscal cliff) …