Avoiding gobbledygook?
Sunday, 7 September 2008
This is Carol’s picture from several weeks back; The Botanist reports eating perhaps this very melon earlier this week….
You may have heard that the term “maverick” originated with the practice of a Texas rancher named Samuel Maverick, who wouldn’t brand his cattle, saying that it hurt them too much. This meant he exercised dibs on any unbranded cattle in his area. So, now we use maverick for unbranded range cattle, and for someone who’s independent-minded and refuses to conform to group mores.
What you may not have heard is that his grandson, Maury Maverick, originated the term “gobbledygook” to refer to nonsense language or deliberately obscure wording.
I heard about Maury from The Botanist, who heard Maury speak in the late 1930s, when he was a US House member from Texas; I got the etymological detail from, where else, Wikipedia….