Word: gobbledygook
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MODERN American speech, while not always clear or correct or turned with much style, is supposed to be uncommonly frank. Witness the current explosion of four-letter words and the explicit discussion of sexual topics. In fact, gobbledygook and nice-Nellyism still extend as far as the ear can hear. Housewives on television may chat about their sex lives in terms that a decade ago would have made gynecologists blush; more often than not, these emancipated women still speak about their children's "going to the potty." Government spokesmen talk about "redeployment" of American troops; they mean withdrawal. When...
...interviewers sum up whatever news they may have coaxed from him and expose any equivocations. Robert Finch, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, was on his way out but still within earshot when Evans noted that on the subject of federal welfare standards, "we got a lot of gobbledygook...
Haunches & Knuckles. It sounds like utter gobbledygook until Jordan explains what he means by "playing keys." In simplest terms it means to study an opponent, searching for clues to his intentions, then outmaneuvering him to break up the play. It can be as simple as noting the direction of an enemy lineman's charge-and divining that the play will go the opposite way. It can also be pretty cute. "When an offensive guard comes up to the line," says Tackle Ray Jacobs of the American Football League's Miami Dolphins, "I watch the way he sets himself...
...with these comments: "This is only the latest and worst of a long number of drafts sent here for presidential signature. At the very least, each message should be (a) in English, (b) clear and trenchant in its style, (c) logical in its structure and (d) devoid of gobbledygook. The State Department draft on the academy failed each one of these tests (including, in my view, the first...
...intelligent, redblooded, white, church-going non-Communist like I ... would avoid ending up in the nude." JC, who tells about half the story in a stilted diary, is risibly riddled with middle-class hypocrisy. He believes in, and mouths at inappropriate moments, all the sociological doubletalk, cold war gobbledygook, and commercial jargon that he has ever heard...