where does the phrase jibber jabber come from

Where does the phrase jibber jabber come from full#

Curiously, the word 'foggiest' seems to be used by Brits most often without any expressed referent, starting (in print) in 1917, with 'I haven't the foggiest.' Or, as the OED puts it, the word is 'Used negatively in superl., with ellipsis of idea, notion.' (VSD)ĭavid is, of course, right about 'foggiest.' Dickens is the first author quoted by the OED for the expression 'foggy idea': 'A dull and foggy sort of idea,' in Barnaby Rudge. helter-skelter, hanky-panky, roly-poly, willy-nilly, hocus-pocus), coupling 'jibber' and 'jabber' would have been a natural formation at any time in the last 400 years, and it may have been commonplace for many years before it finally appeared in print. Given English-speakers' love of reduplicated words (e.g. gabble, yabber, gab, jabble.) The earliest sighting of 'jibber-jabber' recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1922, but that doesn't mean that was 'the year it first appeared'. (There are a number of similar words in English all meanig much the same thing - e.g. 'Jibber' (spelt 'gibber') was used by Shakespeare 'jabber' is recorded in 1499. : Jibber-jabber is a coupling of 'jibber' and 'jabber', which are themselves variants of the same onomatopoeic verb meaning 'To speak rapidly and inarticulately to chatter, talk nonsense'.

: : Not having even the 'foggiest' idea is having no idea at all not even a badly formed, undefined one. : : As for the second part, something that is 'foggy' is unclear, hard to discern - for fairly obvious reasons - so a foggy idea (if such a phrase existed) would be a vague one. Also, where did the phrase 'I haven't the foggiest idea' come from? : : : Where did the phrase 'jibber jabber' come from? I need the year it first appeared. That version may suggest a closer connection with gobble and gab and a lesser one with jibber and jabber.In Reply to: Jibber jabber posted by Victoria S Dennis on Novemat 16:32: But at one time, it had a hard g some current dictionaries give that as a variant pronunciation though it survives only to a small extent - a British survey in 1998 found the hard g form was used by only 4% of respondents.

Today, it’s almost always said like jibberish, with a soft g sound. One notable point about gibberish is that it has shifted pronunciation. There is, you will appreciate, no truth in this. Hence, the story goes, gebberish or gibberish.

Where does the phrase jibber jabber come from full#

The reason is to baffle and lead into error everyone except those whom God loves and provides for.” He seems to have succeeded splendidly in this aim, for the work - like most of the writings attributed to him - is hard to understand, full of mystical musings and technical terms that can’t easily be translated. This says: “And, as always, we deliberately abrogate in one book what we say in another. One work attributed to him is The Book of Stones According to the Opinion of Balinas. His name is attached to hundreds of books, covering such an encyclopaedic range that some scholars have argued he was the pseudonym of a syndicate or was awarded authorship by posterity. The best of the invented stories about its origin is the one that Dr Samuel Johnson subscribed to in his Dictionary of 1755: “t is probably derived from the chymical cant, and originally implied the jargon of Geber and his tribe.” Geber is a Latinised form of the name of a prolific eighth-century Arabic writer, Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan. The alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan, from a 15th century European portrait of “Geber”.

Other experts prefer an origin in an unrecorded Germanic word.

An eighteenth-century writer linked gibberish with the French word geber, meaning to cheat, which is now not thought to be in the least likely. But how they arrived and in what order is unknown. There’s a set of similar words - gibber, jibber, jabber, gobble and gab (as in gift of the gab) - that may be related attempts at imitating incomprehensible utterances. It was worse even than calling it double Dutch or asserting that it was all Greek.Įtymologists have been scratching their heads over its origin almost since it first appeared in the language in the middle 1500s. But at its strongest, in its earlier days, gibberish was speech that belonged to no known language. To describe some attempt at communication as gibberish today is most likely to disparage it as mere meaningless verbiage.