Sapient6
New member
It is less British than you think from what I have read.
The term gobbledygook was coined by Maury Maverick, a former congressman from Texas and former mayor of San Antonio. When Maverick was chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation during World War II, he sent a memorandum that said: "Be short and use plain English. ... Stay off gobbledygook language." Maverick defined gobbledygook as "talk or writing which is long, pompous, vague, involved, usually with Latinized words." The allusion was to a turkey, "always gobbledygobbling and strutting with ridiculous pomposity.
Nice. It's a word I heard plenty when I was a kid, and I'm pretty sure I didn't leave the US until I was 12. So I was surprised at the idea that the word is somehow inherently British.