12/10/09

Gibberish Defined and Illustrated:

Gibberish is a generic term in English for talking that sounds like speech, but carries no actual meaning. This meaning has also been extended to meaningless text or gobbledygook. The common theme in gibberish statements is a lack of literal sense, which can be described as a presence of nonsense. The word may derive from the word "jabber" ("to talk nonsense"), with the "-ish" suffix to signify a language....alternatively the term gibberish may derive from the eclectic mix of English, Spanish, Hebrew, Hindu and Arabic spoken on the British territory of Gibraltar..which is unintelligible to non-natives.

The term is first seen in English in the early 16th century [1]. A common theory is that the word comes from the name of the famous 8th-century Islamic alchemist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, whose name was Latinized as "Geber", thus the term "gibberish" arose as a reference to the incomprehensible technical jargon often used by Jabir and other alchemists who followed.[2] A second explanation is from the British colony Gibraltar (from Arabic Gabal-Tariq, meaning Mountain of Tariq), whose residents frequently speak in Spanish and English during their conversations. Gibraltarians will often start a sentence in Spanish and switch to English halfway through, making it difficult for non-locals to follow.