From Richard Nordquist,
Your Guide to Grammar & Composition.
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Definition:

Inflated, jargon-cluttered prose that fails to communicate clearly.

Etymology:

Coined in 1944 by Maury Maverick, a Texas lawyer and government official, in a memorandum expressing disdain for the "gobbledygook language" of his colleagues. The word was inspired, he said, by the turkey, "always gobbledy gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity."

Examples and Observations:

• "Rumsfeld was making this point this morning . . .. To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say, and you can't rely on their judgment. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong."
  (H.R. Haldeman, President Nixon's chief of staff, recording made in the Oval Office, June 14, 1971)



• "Oh, meltdown. It's one of those annoying buzzwords. We prefer to call it an unrequested fission surplus."
  (Charles Montgomery Burns in "Homer Defined," The Simpsons)



• "Aren't words like paradigm and pro-active just words that stupid people use to sound smart?"
  ("Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie," The Simpsons)



• "Where the combined value of the above payments before actual assimilation remains greater than the combined value of the payments after assimilation, the former level of pay will be protected. These protection arrangements apply to the combined value of payments before and after assimilation, not to individual pay components, excepting the provision relating to retention of existing on-call arrangements."
  (Agenda for Change document from the Central Manchester and Manchester Children’s University Hospitals NHS Trust, 2005)

Pronunciation: GOB-ul-dee-GOOK

Also Known As: bafflegab