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Witter + Waffle = Gobbledegook

They never shorten anything – that would make it less important – they inflate the language in a way they certainly oughtn’t to, indeed everything goes into officialese, a kind of gobbledygook invented by the sort of people who never open a (hardcover) book.

GOBBLEDEGOOK

That comment by poet Gavin Ewart refers to the propensity of ignorant people to witter and waffle and to inflate plain language into a meaningless, pretentious form of expression we recognise as gobbledegook (or gobbledygook).

‘Witter words’ are a key ingredient of gobbledook. Our language is liberally sprinkled with them – expressions that clog a sentence and add neither information nor meaning.

In this, wittering and witter words differ from circumlocution, which adds information, but in the wrong order – usually delaying the main point. In our death notice for the Rev A M Bennett (see page) the reader has to plod through 53 words before arriving at ‘breathed his last’. But those 53 words did at least tell us the place and time of death, how long he had been a vicar, the name of the church, the extent of his influence and the reaction in his parish to the news.

Witter words, on the other hand, tell us nothing. Some are more often heard in speech (especially speeches by pundits and politicians) but many appear in writing.

For a classic example of wittering, loaded with witter words, we could hardly do better than this passage from a speech by former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Mr Hawke had so perfected his ability to say almost nothing in the maximum number of words that the style became known as ‘Hawkespeak’:

And that tends to mean at times if you want to put it, there is no point in running away from it, it tends to mean at times that there’s a lack of specificity, or if you want to put it another way, there’s a range of options which are put which are there to accommodate that indisputable fact about the social democratic parties such as ours.

National Times, November 22, 1985

Here’s a compilation of witter words and phrases, many of which you’ll recognise:

Witter Warning List

as it were

as such (as in according to the rules, as such, they do not preclude . . .)

absolutely (typically used instead of yes)

abundantly, abundantly clear

actually

all things being equal

as a matter of fact

as far as I am concerned

as of right now

at the end of the day

at this moment in time

a total of (as in a total of forty-two applicants instead of forty-two applicants)

basically

by definition

by and large (has anyone ever worked out the meaning of this?)

currently

curiously enough

during the period from (instead of from January 16 to . . .)

each and every

existing

extremely

funnily enough (usually precedes something that is not funny at all)

good and proper

good and ready

having said that (get ready for the contradiction!)

I am here to tell you

I am of the opinion that

I am the first to admit (how can you be so sure?)

I have to say, here and now

if you like

in a manner of speaking

in due course

in other words

in point of fact

in the final analysis

in view of the fact that

it goes without saying that (but I’ll say it anyway)

I would like to say (and I certainly will)

I would like to take this opportunity to

last but not least

let me just say, right here and now

let us just be clear about this

may I make so bold as to say

many a time; many’s the time that

more than enough; more than a little

never cease to wonder

(to) name but a few

needless to say

no two ways about it

not to mention

obviously

oddly enough

of course

of necessity (instead of necessarily)

on the basis of

once and for all

one and the same

precious few

quite

quite simply

really

rest assured

say nothing of (as in to say nothing of last year’s results . . .)

shall I say (as in it is, shall I say, a novel approach . . .)

so much the better, so much the worse

the fact of the matter (as in The fact of the matter is, the Government is wrong, a form commonly used by politicians for the claim I hope to get away with . . .)

to all intents and purposes

to my mind, to one’s own mind

to the point that

unless and until (as in unless and until they pay, they can’t board the ship. Either word makes the necessary condition, so one of them is redundant.)

when all is said and done (not entirely meaningless but perhaps better replaced with still/however/nevertheless)

with all due respect, with the greatest respect

within the foreseeable future

y’know?

Here’s a sentence which includes three witter phrases:

Needless to say, we are, if you like, facing difficulties which, when all is said and done, we did not create ourselves.

The sheer lack of meaning in those phrases becomes more obvious when we find we can move them around the sentence, with no perceivable effect:

We are, if you like, facing difficulties which, needless to say, when all is said and done, we did not create ourselves.

Or:

When all is said and done, we are, if you like, facing difficulties which, needless to say, we did not create ourselves.

Without the witter words the sentence is more forceful, half as long, and has not lost any of its meaning: We are facing difficulties which we did not create ourselves.

The second ingredient of gobbledegook is waffle; vague and wordy utterances that wander aimlessly along a path of meaning but effectively obscure it. In its extreme form it’s called verbal diarrhoea or, more correctly, logorrhoea. When you combine this affliction with a good helping of witter words and a tendency to tangle your syntax the result is total obfuscation, or gobbledegook.

The former US President George Bush was an acknowledged master of gobbledegook – of using language (perhaps not intentionally, given his difficulties with English), not to reveal, but to obscure. Here he is, chatting with one of the astronauts on the space shuttle Atlantis: ‘How was the actual deployment thing?’ he asks. And again, this time in full flow when asked if he would look for ideas on improving education during a forthcoming trip abroad:

Well, I’m going to kick that one right into the end zone of the Secretary of Education. But, yes, we have all – he travels a good deal, goes abroad. We have a lot of people in the department that does that. We’re having an international – this is not as much education as dealing with the environment – a big international conference coming up. And we get it all the time, exchanges of ideas. But I think we’ve got – we set out there – and I want to give credit to your Governor McWherter and to your former governor, Lamar Alexander – we’ve gotten great ideas for a national goals programme from – in this country – from the governors who were responding to, maybe, the principal of your high school, for heaven’s sake.

In 1944, a Texas congressman named Maury Maverick became so angry about the bloated bureaucratic language in memos he received that he described it as ‘gobbledegook’. Explaining the name he said it reminded him ‘of an old turkey gobbler back in Texas that was always gobbledy-gobbling and strutting around with ludicrous pomposity. And at the end of of this gobble-gobble-gobble was a sort of a gook’. Maverick was also the head of a federal agency, and promptly issued an order to all his subordinates: ‘Be short and say what you are talking about. Let’s stop pointing up programs, finalizing contracts that stem from district, regional or Washington levels. No more patterns, effectuating, dynamics. Anyone using the words activation or implementation will be shot’.

Half a century later it seems that the Maverick Edict has had little effect. The art world certainly never heard of it:

The spontaneous improvisation of trivial and fictional roles means a frame for social and communicative creativity which, by going beyond mere art production, understands itself as an emancipated contribution towards the development of newer and more time-appropriate behavior forms and a growth of consciousness . . .

Studio International, 1976

In a fit of liberalism you may excuse such babblings because writing about art is often incomprehensible anyway. But it is harder to excuse organisations supposedly dedicated to the art of human communication. Here is an extract from the Stanford University Press catalogue (1994) touting a forthcoming title called Materialities of Communication, edited by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K Ludwig Pfeiffer:

Converging with a leitmotiv in early deconstruction, with Foucauldian discourse analysis, and with certain tendencies in cultural studies, such investigations on the constitution of meaning include – under the concept ‘materialities of communication’ – any phenomena that contribute to the emergence of meaning without themselves belonging to this sphere: the human body and various media technologies, but also other situations and patterns of thinking that resist or obstruct meaning-constitution.

Of course, to the normal person the first few words of a passage like this flash warning signs of impenetrability; to proceed would be to enter a mental maze from which there is no escape. But not all gobbledegook is that obliging. Much of it can entice you all the way through a wide and welcoming thoroughfare until, at the very end, you realise you are in a blind alley.

All the examples quoted in this chapter are real although it may seem at times that some genius made them up. Let them be a warning! Next time you are tempted to lapse into what reads or sounds like gobbledegook, remember that Texas turkey.