Paul Schleifer

February 25 2018

Word of the Day: Jabber

Jabber is both a noun and a verb. As a verb, it means “to talk or utter rapidly, indistinctly, incoherently, or nonsensically; chatter.” As a noun, it means “rapid, indistinct, or nonsensical talk; gibberish,” according to Dictionary.com. The verb appears in English first, in the 1650s, according to etymonline.com: “spelling variant of Middle English jablen (c. 1400), also javeren, jaberen, chaveren, jawin; probably ultimately echoic.” The noun appears in the 1720s.

Related to jabber is, of course, jibber-jabber. This lovely term is an example of reduplication, a linguistics term that describes the doubling or duplication of the root or stem of a word. This process begins early in the language acquisition of babies, where they repeat a syllable exactly or with some slight change. Hence we get “mama” and “dada” and “bubba” for family members. My grandson, when he was little, began to call his grandmother (the other one) “nina”; his sister calls her “nani,” a nearly exact reversal.

There are even different kinds of reduplication. In English we have exact reduplication in words like “bye-bye,” “choo-choo,” “night-night,” “pee-pee,” and “no-no,” among others. We also have rhyming reduplication, in words such as “hokey-pokey,” “super-duper,” “teenie-weenie,” “itzy-bitzy,” and many more. In addition there is ablaut reduplication, where the internal vowel of the word changes, such as we see in “jibber-jabber”: “criss-cross,” “chit-chat,” “hip-hop,” “ding-dong,” and “zig-zag,” among others. Finally, we have shm reduplication, where the second version is differentiated by an initial shm sound: “fancy-schmancy,” “baby-shmaby,” and almost an infinite number of others.

Etymonline.com also gives “gibberish”: “’rapid and inarticulate speech; talk in no known language,’ 1550s, imitative of the sound of chatter, probably influenced by jabber. Used early 17c. of the language of rogues and gypsies.”

Echoic, by the way, means a sound formed in imitation of some other sound. We learned the word onomatopoeia when we were in school, and this is basically the same thing. In the case of “jabber,” or “jibber-jabber,” or “gibberish,” the imitation is not of some natural sound, like the sound of a cat or of a “babbling brook,” but rather of someone else’s language. It sounds kind of insulting, doesn’t it, to say that someone speaking in another language is talking gibberish?

But it could be worse. The Greeks referred to everyone who was not Greek as barbaroi, translated into English as barbarians, meaning someone who is savage or in an uncivilized state. Barbaroi itself is echoic, the Greeks’ way of imitating the sound of the speech of foreigners. So anybody who speaks a language other than Greek is a barbarian, though admittedly the term did not become pejorative until after the Persians started trying to take over Greece.

Today is February 25, and here are some of today’s birthdays:
Bobby Riggs (1918)
Sun Myung Moon (1920)
Sally Jessy Raphael (1935)
Billy Packer (1940)
Ric Flair (1949)
Chelsea Handler (1975)

Seems like an appropriate day for jabber to be the word.

The image is of The Jabberwock, by John Tenniel. “Jabberwocky,” by Lewis Carol, is a nonsense poem, so the whole thing is a bunch of jabber. According to Carrol, in a letter he wrote, “The Anglo-Saxon word ‘wocer’ or ‘wocor’ signifies ‘offspring’ or ‘fruit’. Taking ‘jabber’ in its ordinary acceptation of ‘excited and voluble discussion’, this would give the meaning of ‘the result of much excited and voluble discussion.’” We would label a word like “jabberwock” a portmanteau word, “A word which combines the meaning of two words (or, rarely, more than two words), formed by combining the words, usually, but not always, by adjoining the first part of one word and the last part of the other, the adjoining parts often having a common vowel.” The term was coined by Lewis Carroll in 1871.