Gibberish

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For the language game, see Gibberish (language game).

Gibberish is a generic term in English for talking that sounds like speech, but has no actual meaning (such as "ja sun tecumba tapar") or ("la bgud duyier jusrekd, oh mai!"). This meaning has also been extended to meaningless text or gobbledygook, such as "the cats are eating my shmibbleboop, someone save the prostate gland from defibble nozzle sands". The common theme in gibberish statements is a lack of literal sense, which can also be described as a presence of nonsense. In the realm of computers, the displaying or printing of binary (non-text) data due to a fault in hardware and/or software is called gibberish (e.g. simulated by entering "TYPE C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CMD.EXE" or "cat /bin/sh"). It is also a "language" frequently used by teenagers that can be understood, in which the words are divided by syllables and the first sound is spoken, followed by "idiga", then the last sound.

A family of language games in English are sometimes referred to as "Gibberish". Comedian Sid Caesar was noted for what he called "double-talk", an ability to speak varieties of nonsense syllables that sounded (to Americans) as if he was speaking various foreign languages.

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[edit] Origin of the term

Look up gibberish in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

The term is first seen in English in the early 16th century [1]. There are two common theories of origin for the term "gibberish". One says that the basis is in the old word "gibber" which is allied to "jabber". However, the use of "gibberish" is recorded before the use of "gibber", which weakens this theory. A second explanation says the word comes from the name of the eighth-century alchemist Jaber ibn Hayyan, who invented a strange terminology so that his works could not be understood by others, thus protecting himself against charges of heresy[citation needed].

[edit] Uses in Fiction

In the "Sons of Arizona" storyline of the comic series "Y: The Last Man", Yorick Brown's compatriots Agent 355 and Dr. Allison Mann communicate in Gibberish when not wishing to be understood. A woman the trio have encountered instantly recognizes the Gibberish, describing it to Yorick (who had been told it was Chinese) as "like Pig Latin that only girls know".

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[edit] References

  1. ^ Chantrell, Glynnis (2002). The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 231.