February 25 2018<\/p>\n
Word of the Day: Jabber<\/em><\/p>\n Jabber<\/em> is both a noun and a verb. As a verb, it means \u201cto talk or utter rapidly, indistinctly, incoherently, or nonsensically; chatter.\u201d As a noun, it means \u201crapid, indistinct, or nonsensical talk; gibberish,\u201d according to Dictionary.com. The verb appears in English first, in the 1650s, according to etymonline.com: \u201cspelling variant of Middle English jablen (c. 1400), also javeren, jaberen, chaveren, jawin; probably ultimately echoic.\u201d The noun appears in the 1720s.<\/p>\n Related to jabber<\/em> is, of course, jibber-jabber<\/em>. 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 \u201cmama\u201d and \u201cdada\u201d and \u201cbubba\u201d for family members. My grandson, when he was little, began to call his grandmother (the other one) \u201cnina\u201d; his sister calls her \u201cnani,\u201d a nearly exact reversal.<\/p>\n There are even different kinds of reduplication. In English we have exact reduplication in words like \u201cbye-bye,\u201d \u201cchoo-choo,\u201d \u201cnight-night,\u201d \u201cpee-pee,\u201d and \u201cno-no,\u201d among others. We also have rhyming reduplication, in words such as \u201chokey-pokey,\u201d \u201csuper-duper,\u201d \u201cteenie-weenie,\u201d \u201citzy-bitzy,\u201d and many more. In addition there is ablaut reduplication, where the internal vowel of the word changes, such as we see in \u201cjibber-jabber\u201d: \u201ccriss-cross,\u201d \u201cchit-chat,\u201d \u201chip-hop,\u201d \u201cding-dong,\u201d and \u201czig-zag,\u201d among others. Finally, we have shm reduplication, where the second version is differentiated by an initial shm sound: \u201cfancy-schmancy,\u201d \u201cbaby-shmaby,\u201d and almost an infinite number of others.<\/p>\n Etymonline.com also gives \u201cgibberish\u201d: “\u2019rapid and inarticulate speech; talk in no known language,\u2019 1550s, imitative of the sound of chatter, probably influenced by jabber. Used early 17c. of the language of rogues and gypsies.\u201d<\/p>\n Echoic<\/em>, 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 \u201cjabber,\u201d or \u201cjibber-jabber,\u201d or \u201cgibberish,\u201d the imitation is not of some natural sound, like the sound of a cat or of a \u201cbabbling brook,\u201d but rather of someone else\u2019s language. It sounds kind of insulting, doesn\u2019t it, to say that someone speaking in another language is talking gibberish?<\/p>\n But it could be worse. The Greeks referred to everyone who was not Greek as barbaroi<\/em>, translated into English as barbarians, meaning someone who is savage or in an uncivilized state. Barbaroi<\/em> itself is echoic, the Greeks\u2019 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.<\/p>\n Today is February 25, and here are some of today\u2019s birthdays: Seems like an appropriate day for jabber<\/em> to be the word.<\/p>\n The image is of The Jabberwock, by John Tenniel. \u201cJabberwocky,\u201d 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.\u2019\u201d We would label a word like \u201cjabberwock\u201d a portmanteau word<\/strong>, \u201cA 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.\u201d The term was coined by Lewis Carroll in 1871.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Paul Schleifer February 25 2018 Word of the Day: Jabber Jabber is both a noun and a verb. As a verb, it means \u201cto talk or utter rapidly, indistinctly, incoherently, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2128,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-word-of-the-day","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2129,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2127\/revisions\/2129"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBobby Riggs (1918)
\nSun Myung Moon (1920)
\nSally Jessy Raphael (1935)
\nBilly Packer (1940)
\nRic Flair (1949)
\nChelsea Handler (1975)<\/p>\n