Word: gobbledygook
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Vinson has studied firsthand the ability of jurors to cope in several huge cases. His conclusion: jurors try hard, but lawyers do a poor job of explaining. Typically, lawyers spend years piling up documents until jurors get lost in the minutiae. Eventually, says Vinson, they stop listening to the gobbledygook. Instead, they watch the facial expressions of lawyers to try to guess whether the lawyers themselves believe the evidence. Adds Harvard's Arthur R. Miller: "Lawyers like to put up smokescreens. They make these cases more complicated than they...
Perhaps when these six people met over pizza (they almost entitled the book The Pizza Papers), the gobbledygook appropriate to high-level briefings and high-flown speeches and editorials just sounded like the absurdity that...
Anyone who is an expert at deciphering gobbledygook might lend a hand to C. Milton Allen, senior vice president of Houston's Panhandle Eastern Pipe Line Co. For the past two months, he and 15 aides have been waging a bleary-eyed battle to make sense out of not just that mumbo-jumbo masterpiece but plenty of others like it. The language is from the pricing regulations drawn up by the Council on Wage and Price Stability (COWPS) to enforce Jimmy Carter's Stage II guidelines. The rules were supposed to put some muscle into the White House...
...both from his father James, one of the most brilliant men of 19th century England, and from Jeremy Bentham; or that Alexander the Great got from a tutor named Aristotle. But even those who reject Holt's radical solution find it hard to disagree with his view that administrative gobbledygook too often comes between children and their desire to learn. "People have been transmitting knowledge and skills for centuries," notes Holt. "Not everyone does it equally well, but it is an accessible skill...
...relaxing at his Washington home, where he lives with his wife, Mary, a silk-screen artist; they have three children. Kahn swims, skis, jogs and likes to sing Gilbert and Sullivan tunes. A certain whimsy is often on display. In a memo he once urged his staff to avoid gobbledygook and write "as though you are talking to or communicating with real people. I have heard it said that style is not substance, but without style what is substance?" Kahn concluded: "A final example of pomposity, probably, is this memo itself...