gobbledygook (gobbledegook) /GOB-əl-di-gook or GOB-əl-di-guuk/. noun. “The overinvolved, pompous talk of officialdom.” Pretentious verbiage. Unintelligible jargon. The first recorded use was in 1944 by U.S. Representative Maury Maverick who banned “gobbledygook language.” Maverick later noted he’d coined the word because it was onomatopoeic…it sounded like a turkey. See also: bafflegab.
“If a Super-Power wanted to contact man, it seems unlikely to me that it’d be all wrapped up in a lot of complicated gobbledegook. It would all be very clear indeed.” (Dallas McCord Reynolds)
“‘I am not at liberty to tell you what is wrong.’ It can’t be much fun having to parrot such gobbledygook. But who would want to work for a service where you earn promotion not for the number of people you let through but for the number you turn back?” (J.M. Coetzee)
“Ask a toad what beauty, great beauty, the to kalon is? He’ll answer that it’s his female toad, with her big round eyes starting out of her little head… . Ask philosophers, finally, and they’ll respond with gobbledygook; they have to have something in conformity with the archetype of the beautiful in its essence…” (Voltaire, trans. by P. Gay)
“A spider, a spiral, a one-eyed man”? What is that? A shopping list? A dance track? A line from a sodding haiku?
“Crispin, if I knew, I’d tell you, I swear.”
“Then it may just be random gobbledegook.” (David Mitchell)
“The multi-media self-consciousness of U2’s Achtung Baby/Zooropa phase, which simultaneously embraced and debunked the mythology and gobbledygook of rock stardom, capitalism, and power, and of which Bono’s white-faced, gold-lamé-suited, red-velvet-horned MacPhisto incarnation was the emblem, is what Wenders was criticizing.” (Salman Rushdie)
“But in reality the psychologist is simply tapping random and meaningless taps onto the lip, he doesn’t give a damn what he’s tapping, and the paralyzed, deaf-dumb-and-blind dentist gets enormously confused, there in the numb black, and he begins trying to move his upper lip, to communicate his confusion to his wife, to ask what the problem is, what’s this gobbledygook being tapped onto his lip, but the psychologist is meanwhile engaging the woman in clever conversation, and mild flirtation…” (David Foster Wallace)