Back when I was editor of eSense, a magazine-style newsletter published by SENSE, the society for English-language professionals based in the Netherlands, one of my colleagues posted a question on the SENSE forum. “I need to crowdsource a copywriting term,” she wrote. “What’s the name for the key bit of text, often a direct quote, that you extract from an article and feature in a box?”

As it turns out the answer is “pull quote” which sounds intriguing but isn’t what I want to talk about now. What really got my language cortex going was the word “crowdsource”, a term new to me at the time but one I supposed had been around for years. Google proved me right. There it was, defined by Grant Barrett in a New York Times column on the buzzwords of 2007: “Crowdsource ‒ to use the skills or tools of a wide variety of freelancers, professional or amateur, paid or unpaid, to work on a single problem.”

Wow, I thought. Crowdsource. What a good description of how SENSE works. The term is so good I can almost forgive the word its gobbledygooky flavor. But what I can’t and won’t ever forgive is gobbledygook, for being what it is.

Another ramble on Google produced the following info: the G-word was coined in 1944 by one Maury Maverick in a memo banning gobbledygook language at the Smaller War Plants Corporation. Mr. Maverick made it up in imitation of a turkey’s gobble in reaction to his frustration with the convoluted language of bureaucrats. So it’s an American word but it has its equals in other languages including French (charabia), German (Kauderwelsch), Dutch (koeterwaals) and Italian (gergo incomprensibile). It’s gibberish, the converse of clear and concise, so confusing that no one can be expected to understand it.

Readability tools, the ‘prose’ and cons

There are online tools that rate how gobbledygooky your text is. For example, there’s the wonderfully named SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook), a formula that estimates the years of education needed to fully understand your writing.

Another option is ReadAble. I was pleased to learn that my website (yes, you’re on it now: raginiwerner.com) scores an average reading ease of 64.1% on ReadAble which means my website should be easily understood by 13 to 14 year olds. Needless to say (ahem), that goes to show my penchant for unadorned philological composition I practise what I preach.

However, what does need saying is that simple (simplistic) readability tools like these rate only aspects of the complexity of your writing. The statistics they produce don’t free your writing of gobbledygook and won’t magically make it plain to read for the people you’re trying to reach, no matter what kind of writing you do: fiction or non-fiction, from sapphic lit to commercial ad-speak.

As Gael Spivak points out in The importance of plain language, “There’s no formula or trick that will make a document plain. Not even the free readability formulas you can find online these days. Running your document through a readability formula will not make the text meet the readers’ needs. These programs have no way to even assess what readers’ needs are.” Gael has summarized some of the research on this in her own blog post Readability formulas, programs and tools: Do they work for plain language?

So be warned! Don’t rely only on readability statistics. For real help on writing in plain language you can turn to the Plain English Campaign, a UK organization that has been fighting the good fight against gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information since 1979. Among other services, they provide training and accreditation and have some really good guides to writing in plain English. They also have handy software like Drivel Defence to help you check for plain English in both docs and web texts. And, just for fun, they have a Gobbledygook Generator which you can play with to your heart’s content to produce meaningless, empty phrases. Just so you know what to avoid….

Let me leave you now with a master practitioner of the utmost of unplain language. Professor Stanley Unwin was a British comic actor and writer who invented his own comic language, “Unwinese” aka gobbledygook. Unwinese was a corrupted form of English in which he altered words in playful ways. Unwin claimed that the inspiration came from his mother, who once told him that on the way home she had “falolloped (fallen) over” and “grazed her kneeclabbers”.

Rejoico! Here Stanley Unwin, the worldidode’s grotelidiest linguabold, apparates in manily fantalistic wordings. Kiss me cuddly! Deep joy!

Learn more

Gobbledegook, Gibberish, and Deep Joy, a really nice post on Unwinese by Josie Holford 

Crowdsource definition: Alas for non-subscribers, this New York Times column is now behind a paywall but, given that I’m one of Roz Chast’s discarded Disney princesses (guess which one) I did quote it correctly. Source: The New Yorker, October 21, 2024

SENSE is a society for English-language professionals based in the Netherlands. Most members either live in or have a professional connection to the Netherlands, but work primarily in English. SENSE publishes an entertaining and informative blog of interest to anyone keen on language.

Featured image

Shared with thanks to the designer ramwebroom. You’ll find this poster and other subversive artwork for sale on their webshop on RedBubble.