the.com/gobbledygook
Language designed to sound smart while saying nothing at all.
means Wordy, convoluted language — often bureaucratic or technical — so dense with jargon that it obscures rather than reveals meaning.
from Coined in the 1940s by a Texas congressman, Maury Maverick, who was fed up with turgid bureaucratic memos. He said the word was meant to evoke a turkey's gobble — 'always gobbledy gobbling' — with a ridiculous, strutting pomposity at the end. He even banned the word's opposite — stiff bureaucratic language itself — in memos he oversaw, which is a nice irony: a politician coining a word to fight the very fog politicians are famous for producing.
- coined by
- Texas congressman Maury Maverick, 1944
- inspired by
- turkeys gobbling pompously, he said
- favorite habitat
- legal contracts and corporate memos
- irony level
- a fancy word mocking fancy words