gobbledygook

Inflated, jargon-cluttered prose that fails to communicate clearly. Contrast with clarity and plain English. Also spelled gobbledegook.

See also:

• 200 Words and Expressions That Tick You Off
• 200 Words and Phrases That Ticked You Off in 2010
• 100 Words and Phrases That Ticked You Off in 2011

• Academese
• Blurred Word
• The Bugbear Style
• Bureaucratese
• Circumlocution
• Initialese
• Legalese
• Mystification
• Rules for Combating Jargon
• Skotison
• Stacking
• Tall Talk
• Title Inflation
• Under the Flapdoodle Tree: Doublespeak, Soft Language, and Gobbledygook
• Verbosity
• Vogue Word
• Word Salad

Editing Exercises:

• Exercise in Eliminating Deadwood From Our Writing
• Exercise in Eliminating Wordiness in Business Writing
• Practice in Cutting the Clutter

Examples and Observations:

• "Gobbledygook or bureaucratese is another kind of doublespeak. Such doublespeak is simply a matter of overwhelming the audience with technical, unfamiliar words. When asked why U.S. forces lacked intelligence information on Grenada before they invaded the island in 1983, Admiral Wesley L. McDonald told reporters that 'We were not micromanaging Grenada intelligence-wise until about that time frame.'"
  (William Lutz, "The World of Doublespeak," 1989)



• "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."
  (H.R. Haldeman, 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)



• "Often when listening to football managers and coaches explain the game I find myself thinking of those moments in Dr Who when, with catastrophe approaching, Matt Smith suddenly announces, 'There's a good chance that if we can reverse the polarity on this lithium crystal then the magnetic vortex will suck the Daleks into a different time-space continuum and the planet will be saved. Has anybody got a hatpin?'
  
  "'Their midfield was playing off us,' the Time Lords of the dugout tell us as relegation hurtles towards our homes like a Zygon battle trireme carrying an explosive payload the size of Ronaldo's wallet. 'We need to get more offensive in the off-loading zone.' Frankly, we all know it is a pile of gobbledygook, but if it has the sheen of plausibility it is more fun to believe in it than not."
  (Harry Pearson, "Will Andy Carroll Prove the Difference That Destroys the Planet?" The Guardian, Nov. 12, 2010)



• "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," Central Manchester and Manchester Children’s University Hospitals NHS Trust, 2005)