the.com/dada

means An early 20th-century anti-art movement that rejected logic, tradition, and conventional aesthetics in favor of absurdity, chance, and deliberate nonsense.

from The popular story is that the name was picked at random by plunging a knife into a French-German dictionary, landing on 'dada,' French baby-talk for 'hobby-horse.' Even its founders told the tale differently at different times — fitting for a movement built on refusing to make sense. What's certain is it emerged in Zurich around 1916, among artists and writers horrified by the carnage of World War I, who chose a nonsense syllable — the kind an infant babbles first — to name their revolt against a 'rational' civilization that had produced mass slaughter.