Word: gobbledygook
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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More aggressively Irish than a swinging shillelagh, Top o' the Morning carries a top-heavy complement of assorted brogues, lively jigs and Gaelic gobbledygook. Arthur Shields, brother of Irishman Barry Fitzgerald, acted as technical adviser. The film's best feature: a handful of little-known traditional Irish airs-one of them a love tune sung by Ann Blyth. Its severest handicap: two typical jukebox tunes which Bing is required to sing a few too many times...
...Unfortunately, it also has more than its share of sentimentality and smugness, and not enough humor to keep it from sliding into a kind of fatuous self-congratulation. To many U.S. moviegoers, its class-conscious propaganda in favor of British traditions will sound, perhaps wrongly, like so much Martian gobbledygook...
...existentialism has made the grade, and people who have been discussing it can now find out what it means ("a . . . theory of man," says the new dictionary, "which expresses the individual's intense awareness of his contingency and freedom . . ."). Onetime Texas Congressman Maury Maverick's great contribution, gobbledygook, for the verbiage of officialdom, is also there, along with a learned note that it derives from the gobblings of turkeys. F.D.R. had contributed iffy (for questions) and H. L. Mencken ecdysiast (for stripteaser...
...reductions were made, said Continental President L. J. Gunson, because of the "postwar readjustment" (gobbledygook for falling sales) and the prospect of increased supplies. Schenley Industries also cut the price on one smaller-selling blend...
Head-Scratching. As the trial lumbered on, the ideological gobbledygook of communism poured in full flood into the ears of Court and jury. Browder, among other things, was accused of the Communist sin of "tailism." "It sounds like some kind of special jargon," the judge said plaintively, and pleaded for an explanation of terms...