Tag: gobbledegook

How to be confused

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A poet I know has published a long paragraph purporting to be by artificial intelligence. I think he wrote it himself? It is like one of those sentences that you write by using the central choice on your keypad to generate a string of words, but much more complicated. For example :

I think I was a child and I used to be a sunset……

Would be a generated sentence.

I’m not using any AI to write but I decided to say something using the word “cuttlefish” just because I thought of it.

So…… here goes.

“Very old cuttlefish walk across pink dessert avenues. They mean nothing to the public air. Hand wash slowly, using cranium crystals. Bleep out sanding shores. Official decision is required before trash can be planted in allergies.”

I guess you can write anything, but will it be understandable, and if infinite monkeys are not able to write Shakespeare, will AI make it so?

Gobbledegook

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Confused, muddled, incoherent. Gobbledegook.

Like double-dutch it’s a word that tries to describe the kind of word salad some people talk rather than a measured and clear explanation.

If you have ever seen “Sir Humphrey”, the political private secretary in “Yes, Minister”, and “Yes, Prime Minister”, the BBC series from the 1980s and 90s, you will know he would used gobbledegook or flimflam (another lovely word) to blag his way through telling the Minister important information without telling him clearly. It’s  in this case a method of obfuscation, using a long tangle of incomprehensible words that is sneaky and makes the story he is trying to tell virtually impossible to understand.

It’s an informal noun and according to Google it is defined as :

language that is meaningless or is made unintelligible by excessive use of technical terms.

“reams of financial gobbledygook”

I hope you enjoyed this word!