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More "Gibberish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dislikes or mistrusts 'the speaking with tongues' (glossolalhia), which was the favourite exhibition of religious enthusiasm at Corinth. (On this subject Prof. Lake's excursus is the most instructive discussion that has yet appeared. The 'Testament of Job' and the magical papyri show that gibberish uttered in a state of spiritual excitement was supposed to be the language of angels and spirits, understood by them and acting upon them as a charm.) He urges his converts to do all things 'decently and in order.' He is alarmed at signs of moral laxity on the part of self-styled ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... havock amongst the King's game; but by means of a sling, not of a bow; like the Hermit, too, he has his peculiar phrases of compotation, the sign and countersign being Passelodion and Berafriend. One can scarce conceive what humour our ancestors found in this species of gibberish; but "I warrant it proved ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... while dangling the censers they keep shaking them in derision, and letting the ashes fly about their heads and faces, one against the other. In this equipage they neither sing hymns nor psalms nor masses, but mumble a certain gibberish as shrill and squeaking as a herd of pigs whipped on to market. The nonsense verses they ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... and the Centaur another boy with the small blue-eyed person in whom he took delight. And this fat and indolent looking boy informed them that he and the girl who was with him were walking in the glaze of the red mustard jar, which Jurgen thought was gibberish: and the fat boy said that he and the girl had decided never to grow any older, which Jurgen said was excellent good sense if ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... feet and call it vulgar. Cobbett is coarse enough, but he is not vulgar. He does not belong to the herd. Nothing real, nothing original, can be vulgar; but I should think an imitator of Cobbett a vulgar man. Emery's Yorkshireman is vulgar, because he is a Yorkshireman. It is the cant and gibberish, the cunning and low life of a particular district; it has 'a stamp exclusive and provincial.' He might 'gabble most brutishly' and yet not fall under the letter of the definition; but 'his speech bewrayeth him,' his dialect (like the jargon of a ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... of the lads, one whispered something to the other, but what it was Vane could not understand, for it sounded mere gibberish. ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... they were taken aback and declared to the public almost with one accord that the writer's eccentricities had developed into mannerisms, that his theories of life were political manifestoes, that his dialects were gibberish, and his defiance of the orthodox canons of autobiography scarcely less than an ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... a young spark, I nearly sang myself into a consumption. How I used to dance! And take my part in a farce, or hold up my end in the barber shops! Who could hold a candle to me except, of course, the one and only Apelles?" He then put his hand to his mouth and hissed out some foul gibberish or other, and said afterwards that it was Greek. Trimalchio himself then favored us with an impersonation of a man blowing a trumpet, and when he had finished, he looked around for his minion, whom he called Croesus, a blear-eyed slave whose teeth were very disagreeably ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... nothing of it. It sounded, however, so quite like a dictum which she herself would have liked to make, that she cross-questioned Sylvia afterwards as to its meaning; but Sylvia lied fluently, asserting that it was just some of Professor Kennedy's mathematical gibberish which ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... of this gibberish, they continued the conversation, rendering it thus, even to each other, a dark obscure dialect, eked out by significant nods and signs, but never expressing distinctly, or in plain language, the subject on which it turned. ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... how sweetly he talkt; And how perfectly well he appeared, DOLL, to know All the life and adventures of JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU?— "'Twas there," said he—not that his words I can state— 'Twas a gibberish that Cupid alone could translate;— But "there," said he, (pointing where, small and remote, The dear Hermitage rose), "there his JULIE he wrote,— "Upon paper gilt-edged, without blot or erasure; "Then ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... "The news machine did that over at the Whiteside Morning Record. It was typing out clear copy, then suddenly there wasn't anything but gibberish." ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... Latin was my favorite study, and it seemed sacrilege to believe this gibberish to belong ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... been above whilst I was in the cabin with the others, approached and stared at me, but not insolently—merely with curiosity. They seemed a vile lot, one and all. With some of them every other word was an oath; their talk was almost gibberish to my ears with thieves' slang. I wondered to find not one of them dressed in felon's garb; but on reflection I concluded that they had plundered the crew and the people who had had charge of them and of the Cyprus, and had forced all those they drove out of the brig to change clothes ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... who have been versed in this knack of unfolding and untying riddles, are capable, in any sort of writing, to find out what they desire. But above all, that which gives them the greatest room to play in, is the obscure, ambiguous, and fantastic gibberish of the prophetic canting, where their authors deliver nothing of clear sense, but shroud all in riddle, to the end that posterity may interpret and apply it according ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... man, a dentist and doctor, claiming to come from an eastern city, while sitting at the table last evening, after much insane gibberish, fell back intoxicated upon the floor, and lay insensible for some time. He was finally, when the others had finished eating, dragged off to bed in a most inglorious condition, to suffer later for his dissipation. O, how my heart ached for his dear old ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... Or whisht yer blethers!—whichever way that outlandish, heathenish gibberish your forebears jabbered, would have it. You see, Archie, one great advantage of being Irish—and it's not your fault that you're not, man, I don't blame you—one great advantage is that you can speak all languages with equal ease. Now a Scotchman's tongue is like his sense of ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... also the bottle of Celestial spirits. Ammonia witnessed the process of transference that night, and nearly went mad in his cage, springing about wildly, clinging to the bars, squealing and certainly blaspheming in his peculiar monkey gibberish, and Nicholas Crips sat in his cage, impishly eager to goad his enemy to fury, and ate luscious figs and fine preserves, while the gorilla strained at the intervening bars and ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... to share Miss Keene's sentiments; "and he's so good to those outlandish niggers in the crew. I don't see how the captain could get on with the crew without him; he's the only one who can talk their gibberish and keep them quiet. I've seen him myself quietly drop down among them when they were wrangling. In my opinion," continued the young fellow, lowering his voice somewhat ostentatiously, "you'll find out when we get to ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... avail with us, he is now trying guile. He understands perfectly well some of the things I say to him; but when I told him that we wanted a guide to lead us to the river, he professed to be unable to understand me clearly, and replied by gabbling what I believe to be simply a lot of gibberish, ending up with the statement that we shall be able to have a guide to-morrow. The fact is that I rather suspect him of entertaining a desire to possess himself of our rifles, and believe him to be capable to going to ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... stow him; and if he was discovered, to say that he was one of the house, and leave him to make it good. "You will hear what the gallants say," he added; "but I think thou wilt carry away but little on it; for when it is not French, it is Court gibberish; and that is as ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... Friar Bacon, reveals two of the ingredients, saltpetre and sulphur, and conceals the third in a sentence of mysterious gibberish, as if he dreaded the consequences of his own discovery, (Biog. Brit. vol. i. p. 430, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... idea of Fox, those two or three weird hours that night. It was as if I had never seen him before. The attacks grew more virulent as the night advanced. He groaned and raved, and said things—oh, the most astounding things in gibberish that upset one's nerves and everything else. At the height he sang hymns, and then, as the fits passed, relapsed into incredible clear-headedness. It gave me, I say, a new idea of Fox. It was as if, for all the ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... dark-haired foreign lady, too—she is more fascinating to study than all the rest. She must be a Russian from her colouring, and, besides, she wears those wonderful embroideries. And her servants, too, talk some outlandish gibberish among themselves. Of course she belongs to the nobility, you can see that, even in the ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... acquainted than with the ancient inhabitants of Otaheite. Your origin of the Piks is most able; but then I cannot remember them with any precise discrimination from any other hyperborean nation; and all the barbarous names at the end of the first volume, and the gibberish in the Appendix, was to me as unintelligible as if Repeated Abracadabra; and made no impression on me but to raise respect of your patience, and admire a sagacity that could extract meaning and suite ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... ours is a way much surer; for we cheat in no language at all, but loll in our own coaches, eloquent in gibberish, and learned in jingle. Pull out the parchment [referring to the will of LORD BRUMPTON], there's the deed; I made it as long as I could. Well, I hope to see the day when the indenture shall be the exact measure of the land that passes by it; for 'tis a discouragement to ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... deep silence. And he asked me to be kind enough to close my eyes. Then I heard his voice muttering, in a strange tongue, a queer dark gobbling kind of words, which may have been ancient African spell-words, or sheer gibberish such as magicians in all times and places have ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... off her speech, or chant, which was so much musical gibberish to us, for all that we understood of what she was talking about, and seemed to fix her flashing eyes upon the deep shadow before her. Then in a moment they acquired a vacant, terrified stare, as though they were striving to realise some half-seen horror. She lifted her hand from Leo's ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... tropic isle remote, and passing hailed The village with the cheers of all their fleet; Or quarrelling together, laughed and railed Like foreign sailors, landed in the street Of seaport town, and with outlandish noise Of oaths and gibberish ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... foremast in his language, and what d'ye think he said? Why, I'm blowed if he didn't call it a 'Mar-darty-marng' (and that's the only bit of French I know); but how is it possible to work a ship in such gibberish?" ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... sickness. They gave orders to move the unaffected people in every town and village into isolated barracks and stockades. For half a day Tiger tried to explain ways to prevent the spread of a bacteria or virus-borne disease. The people had stared at him as if he were talking gibberish; finally he gave up trying to explain, and just laid down rules which the people were instructed to follow. Together they had collected standard testing specimens of body fluids and tissue from both healthy and afflicted ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... remarks at the nearest cattle; the tail Kikuyu winds energetically back and forth on his little handle, and tries to keep his feet. And Brown! he is magnificent! His long lash sends out a volley of rifle reports, down, up, ahead, back; his cracked voice roars out an unending stream of apparent gibberish. Back and forth along the line of the team he skips nimbly, the sweat streaming from his face. And the oxen plod along, unhasting, unexcited, their eyes dreamy, chewing the cud of yesterday's philosophic reflections. The situation conveys the general ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... gibberish of the voyageur, I could gather his meaning well enough. He knew of a depository of wax-candles, and the church of the rancheria was the place in which they ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... little old woman. "I did not know whether I myself might speak it so that another could understand. For sixty years I have spoken only their accursed gibberish. For sixty years I have not heard a word in my native language. Poor creature! Poor creature!" she mumbled. "What accursed misfortune threw you ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Brook for his health. He looked like an organ-grinder, and had been once actually on the stage. Well, do you know she allowed him to be introduced to her, and talked to him with as much deference as if he had been a prince, when she ought not have spoken to him at all, you know; and in that gibberish, too, that no one can understand. One evening, after entertaining him for about an hour, she walked with him the whole length of the room, not noticing any one, though every eye was upon her. He sat ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... progress as Pin might make—if she were not already glued firm to her silly notions—would be in quite another direction. For the quarrel had made one thing plain to Laura: with regard to her troubles, she need not look to Pin for sympathy: if Pin talked such gibberish at the hint of putting off an inquisitive old woman, what would she—and not she alone—what would they all say to the tissue of lies Laura had spun round Mr. Shepherd, a holy man, a clergyman, and a personal friend of Mother's into the bargain? She ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan. .. and thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about him, though now some time from home. By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Mary told Lucinda, when they were left together once more. "She puts me beyond all patience. She chatters gibberish that I can't make out a word of for an hour at a time, and then, all of a sudden, she screams, 'Dinner's ready,' or something equally silly, in a voice like a carvin' knife. It's enough to drive a sane person ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... Protestants left among the irresponsible rich. Those who do not follow the main current will probably take up with weird science-denouncing sects of the faith-healing type, or with such pseudo-scientific gibberish as Theosophy. Mrs. Piper (in an inelegant attitude and with only the whites of her eyes showing) has restored the waning faith of Professor James in human immortality, and I do not see why that lady should ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... wanted peace—unity within. So he raved at her because the tag had come off his shoelace, and it was her wifely duty to see that a new lace had been put into the shoe that morning. From that he went on to the usual gibberish of French, the usual accusation against men in the neighbourhood, the usual melange of Chinese tortures and gruesome operations. From Kraill's horrified face Marcella saw that he understood more than she did. She had never been sufficiently ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... apartment. He then galloped out upon the plain, and after half an hour's absence returned, and having placed his horse once more in the stable, came and seated himself next to me, to whom he commenced talking in a gibberish of which I understood very little, but which he intended for French. He was half intoxicated, and soon became three parts so, by swallowing glass after glass of aguardiente. Finding that I made him no answer, he directed his discourse ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... departed for ever. I then got a branch of a bael[1] tree that grew close by, dipped it in the stream, and walking backwards round the ground, waved the dripping branch round my head, repeating at the same time the first gibberish that came into my recollection. My incantation or spell was as follows, an old Scotch rhyme I had often repeated when a child ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... have not learnt it," said Gerda; "but my grandmother understands it, and she can speak gibberish too. I wish I ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... macaronic Spanish, which he had learned in South America, and which provoked Caesar's laughter. He was constantly saying: "My friend," and he mingled Gallicisms with a lot of coarse expressions of Indian or mulatto origin, and with Italian words. Preciozi's dialect was a gibberish worthy ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... could see nothing but nonsense in his matter. He will now have judges. Posterity will pronounce its calm and impartial decision; and that decision will, we firmly believe, place in the same rank with Galileo, and with Locke, the man who found jurisprudence a gibberish and left it a science. Never was there a literary partnership so fortunate as that of Mr Bentham and M. Dumont. The raw material which Mr Bentham furnished was most precious; but it was unmarketable. He was, assuredly, at once a great logician and a great rhetorician. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... journey—I can't say but what I think as my Lady an' Sir Cristifer's done a right thing by a hinnicent child as doesn't know its right hand from its left, i' bringing it where it'll learn to speak summat better nor gibberish, and be brought up i' the true religion. For as for them furrin churches as Sir Cristifer is so unaccountable mad after, wi' pictures o' men an' women a-showing themselves just for all the world as God made 'em. I think, for my part, as it's welly a ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... parents sent With other cattle to the city went; Where having cast his coat, and well pursued The methods most in fashion to be lewd, Return'd a finish'd spark this summer down, Stock'd with the freshest gibberish of the town; A jargon form'd from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit; Form'd by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child; Born between ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... and stayed for some time there discharging its cargo and taking in new. Cooper embraced the opportunity to see all the sights he could of the great metropolis. "He had a rum time of it in his sailor rig," said afterward one of his shipmates, "but hoisted in a wonderful deal of gibberish, according to his own account ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... was gibberish to Andrea Barrofaldi, but Griffin being exclusively naval, he fancied every one ought to take the same interest as he did himself in all these matters. But, while the Vice-governatore did not understand more than half of the other's meaning, that half sufficed ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... said he had been careful to buy a young one that could not speak, for he knew the Morris boys would not want one chattering foreign gibberish, nor yet one that would swear. He had kept her in his bunk in the ship, and had spent all his leisure time in teaching her to talk. Then he looked at her anxiously, and said, ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... because it was true: a joy forever; work Old Masters had loved; full of distinction and power and patience almost Oriental. A thing, Joan Tregenza, worth a wilderness of 'harmonies' and 'impressions,' 'nocturnes' and 'notes,' smudges and audacities. But I suppose that is all gibberish to you?" ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... statesman that the governments of the world owed their peace, defence, and liberties; and from the illiterate and contemned mechanic (a name of disgrace) that they received the improvements of useful arts. Nevertheless, this artificial ignorance, and learned gibberish, prevailed mightily in these last ages, by the interest and artifice of those who found no easier way to that pitch of authority and dominion they have attained, than by amusing the men of business, and ignorant, with hard words, or employing ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... only hed th' sinse to make the furrin' gintleman as could talk the gibberish to question th' Angel choild," said Mrs. O'Malligan indignantly, "sure an' we moight have larned all about her by this toime, entoirely, for there's mony a thing she's tried to tell us an' can't for the want of a worrud. But foind me a man of yer as does any thinkin' 'thout ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... said with slightly acidulous deprecation, "but thanks to the Blessed Virgin and your Reverence's teaching, the text is but gibberish to me and I did but ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... often than not, it is brought about by the exulting chatter of a few irrepressible and also irresponsible individuals who have military or political ambitions to look after, and no other faculty of reason or vocabulary than the gibberish "that war will clear the air." They ostentatiously claim a monopoly of patriotism; and convey their views on war matters with a blustering levity which is a marvel to the astonished soul. Their attitude towards human existence is that you ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... in the above, outcrops of the strong pubescent instinct to enlarge the vocabulary in two ways. One is to affect foreign equivalents. This at first suggests an appetency for another language like the dog-Latin gibberish of children. It is one of the motives that prompts many to study Latin or French, but it has little depth, for it turns out, on closer study, to be only the affectation of superiority and the love of mystifying others. The other ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... They want everything nice that any one uninitiated may have, and beat them if it is not granted, or even strangle and kill people. They do not get into trouble for this, because it is thought that they do not know better. Sometimes they carry on the pretence of talking gibberish, and behaving as if they had returned from the spirit-world. After this they are known by another name, peculiar to those who have 'died Ndembo.' . . . We hear of the custom far along on the upper river, as well as in ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the Baha and Sohrai nor her mother who had reared her in childhood. The witch girl said that if she refused she would die; and she said that she would rather die than do what was required of her. Then the witch did something and the girl began to rave and talk gibberish and from that time was quite out of her senses. Ojhas tried to cure her in vain until at last one suggested that she should be taken to another village as the madness must be the work of witches living in her own ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... affected tone, perhaps a corruption of chaunting; some derive it from Andrew Cant, a famous Scotch preacher, who used that whining manner of expression. Also a kind of gibberish used by thieves and gypsies, called likewise pedlar's ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... wind. Wait shook his head; rolled his eyes; he denied, cursed, threatened—and not a word had the strength to pass beyond the sorrowful pout of those black lips. It was incomprehensible and disturbing; a gibberish of emotions, a frantic dumb show of speech pleading for impossible things, promising a shadowy vengeance. It sobered ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... to putting on clothes and wore only a hat, pants, boots and his smile. Consequently his body became quite mahogany-coloured. When he was wounded he was put under an anaesthetic so that I could search for the bullet. As the anaesthetic began to take effect, Claude talked the usual unintelligible gibberish. Now, we happened to have a Turkish prisoner at the time, and in the midst of Claude's struggles and shouts in rushed an interpreter. He looked round, and promptly came over to Claude, uttering words which I suppose were calculated to soothe a wounded Turk; and we had some difficulty ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... of the day, reading as he ate. Then he pushed the paper aside. The thought had just occurred to him that Rochester had paid that eight thousand not to shield a woman's name but to shield his own. To prevent that gibberish being read out against him ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... in May. They are loquacious throughout the year, especially on moonlight nights. Nor do they wait for the setting of the sun until they commence to pour forth what Eha terms a "torrent of squeak and chatter and gibberish." ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... sacerdotal rituals, beliefs repudiated by a progressive moral religion, plagiarisms and forgeries of literary or liturgic texts, incantations in which the gods of all barbarous nations are invoked in unintelligible gibberish, odd and disconcerting ceremonies—all these form a chaos in which the imagination loses itself, a potpourri in which an arbitrary syncretism seems to have attempted to create an ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... perceived Camilla still listening to Liancourt. He stalked up to her, and as Liancourt, seeing her rise, rose also and moved away, he said peevishly, "You will never learn to conduct yourself properly; you are to be left here to nurse and comfort your uncle, and not to listen to the gibberish of every French adventurer. Well, Heaven be praised, I have a son—girls are a ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Technica" is a modification of Gray's; but, whereas he used both consonants and vowels to represent digits, and had to content himself with a syllable of gibberish to represent the date or whatever other number was required, I use only consonants, and fill in with vowels ad libitum, and thus can always manage to make a real word of whatever has ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... Talbot will shower commissions on his countrymen, and will cut the throats of the English. These verses, which were in no respect above the ordinary standard of street poetry, had for burden some gibberish which was said to have been used as a watchword by the insurgents of Ulster in 1641. The verses and the tune caught the fancy of the nation. From one end of England to the other, all classes were constantly ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... again, talking your dreadful gibberish," said Rose Pompon, turning round towards Faringhea. "First of all, it is not polite; and then the language is so odd, that one might suppose ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the sailor and his companions could comprehend the Krooman's gibberish. They managed to learn from him that he had once been in an English ship, and had made a voyage along the African coast, trading for palm-oil. While on board he had picked up a smattering of English. He was afterwards shipwrecked in a Portuguese ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... English. Madame D'Arblay had carried a bad style to France. She brought back a style which we are really at a loss to describe. It is a sort of broken Johnsonese, a barbarous patois, bearing the same relation to the language of Rasselas, which the gibberish of the negroes of Jamaica bears to the English of the House of Lords. Sometimes it reminds us of the finest, that is to say, the vilest parts, of Mr. Galt's novels; sometimes of the perorations of Exeter Hall; sometimes of the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... growling, and amiable as Bruin. They came muttering some wild jargon about "bulwarks," "bulkheads," "cofferdams," "safeguards," "noble charters," "shields," and "paladiums," "great and glorious birthrights," and other unintelligible gibberish. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... and his discernible lack of sense from Agrinion onward, he felt that the fault was elemental in his nature. It was a mere basic inability to front novel situations which was somehow in the dragoman; he retreated from everything difficult in a smoke of gibberish and gesticulation. Coleman glared at him with the hatred that sometimes ensues when breed meets breed, but he saw that this man was indeed a golden link in his possible success. This man connected him with Greece and its language. If ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... eyes beheld, for I can make nothing out of their heathen gibberish. Yet she who journeyed with us, ever proving herself a modest, high-bred lady in times of sore trial, begged upon her knees, with tears hot upon her cheeks, to be permitted to accompany you and her husband. What result? Why, this good Queen; this ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... voice, in brassy blasts, as though he had been trying to articulate his words through a trombone, was expressing his great regret at a conduct characterised by a very marked want of discretion... As I lived I was being lectured too! His deafening gibberish was difficult to follow, but it was my conduct—mine!—that... Damn! I wasn't ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... the alley, and among the outcries of all the waiting drivers, no one paid any heed to this wild yell, which might have been the woman's usual cry. But this gibberish, intelligible to Jacques Collin, sent to his ear in a mongrel language of their own—a mixture of bad Italian and ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... and the bones of fishes more or less in their hair. Every thing small and diminutive they call "Pickaninnie," and any thing very good, "Merri jig." Their language is a queer, rattling, hard-sounding gibberish, incomprehensible to most people; they speak as fast as possible, laugh immoderately at trifles, and are excellent mimics. Their own ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... talk," ordered Mr. Meredith, fretfully. "Is 't not enough to have French gibberish in the ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... the beans, and Murphy went back to his smoking and his meditations. He made so little of Mike's outburst about the spies that he did not trouble to connect it with any one in the basin. Mike was always talking what Murphy called fool gibberish, that no man of sense would listen to it if he could help it. So Murphy fell to calculating how much of the money he had earned might justly be spent upon a few days' spree without endangering the grubstake he planned to take into the farther ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... conversation together, and not thirty yards away. One of them was my recent companion in the tavern parlour; the other two, by their handsome, sallow features and soft hats, should evidently belong to the same race. A crowd of village children stood around them, gesticulating and talking gibberish in imitation. The trio looked singularly foreign to the bleak dirty street in which they were standing, and the dark grey heaven that overspread them; and I confess my incredulity received at that moment a shock ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... strange being, half wild, half civilised, with the frame of an athlete, and the mind of a child. Although more than thirty years of age, he had never shown much more sense than a two-year-old baby. He even talked in a queer gibberish, such as was suitable to that stage of childhood. Everybody was kind to him. His clothes and his food were given him. As for a roof, he needed none in summer save when it stormed, and in winter he found refuge among his own people. His chief delight was roaming the woods and fields, talking ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... idiot!" A little later, adds Powell, when Jerrold's wife and sister entered, he thrust "Sordello" into their hands, demanding what they thought of it. He watched them intently while they read. When at last Mrs. Jerrold remarked, "I don't understand what this man means; it is gibberish," her delighted husband gave a sigh of relief and exclaimed, "Thank God, I am ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... something into his ear, that sounded, indeed, like human language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing themselves with, by the hour together. At all events, if it involved any secret information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it was in a tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman, and did but increase the bewilderment of his ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... our bedding, in one corner of the barn, swept the concrete floor, rolled the blankets, explained to the gossipy farm servant that I did not "compree" her gibberish, and (p. 037) watched her waddle across the midden towards the house, my duties were ended. I was at liberty until the return of the battalion. It was all very quiet, little was to be heard save the gnawing of the rats in the corner of the barn and the ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... know one syllable of any other language than his own, and it would not have been convenient to talk gibberish to Moriarty, who had a smattering of some of the eastern tongues; so he declined giving his Cashmerian song in its native purity, because, as he said, he never could manage to speak their dialect, though he understood ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... There is a wild gibberish heard in the straw. The fool shrieks, 'Nuncle, come not in here,' and out rushes 'Tom o Bedlam'—the naked creature, as Gloster calls him—with his 'elf locks,' his 'blanketed loins,' his 'begrimed face,' with his shattered wits, his ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... [This tirade of gibberish is literally taken or selected from a mock discourse pronounced by a professed jester, which occurs in an ancient manuscript in the Advocates' Library, the same from which the late ingenious Mr. Weber published the curious ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... appeared to have lost the use of their lower limbs altogether; sitting upon the floor cross-legged in a state of torpor. They never heeded us in the least, scarcely looking conscious of our presence, while Mehevi seated us upon the mats, and Kory-Kory gave utterance to some unintelligible gibberish. ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... little, and he plunged ahead. One of the men told how his bunkie at Base Six in Bordeaux had died of heart failure when under ether. In a somewhat parched voice Tom started to explain how this could come about, but in no time he was talking gibberish. "The aorta," he heard himself saying, "is the big main artery which comes out of one of the ventricles," and then he noticed the dazed look on the men's faces and, floundering hopelessly, managed to laugh it off. Well, he had tried to talk to them, anyway, and by consulting ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... of consternation, while Cadwallader, shutting himself in the closet, that was contiguous to the chamber in which his friend Peregrine was stationed, thrust the label with his uncle's name through a small chink in the partition according to agreement, muttering at the time a sort of gibberish, that increased the panic of his audience; then returning to his chair, the knell was tolled again, and Pickle called aloud, "D—n your ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... tried it in reverse position: ruoj ud ebua'l a. The translation was gibberish. Then he wrote the first and last letters, the second and next to last, the third and the third from last, and so on. The result, too, was gibberish. Next he dropped the first word, 'a' and tried the ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... and Miss Portman; and he observed that my lord and my lady were coming together more than they used to be since Miss Portman left the house. To which Champfort replied with an oath, like an unmannered reprobate as he is, and in his gibberish, French and English, which I can't speak; but the sense of it was this:—'My lord and lady shall never come together, if I can help it. It was to hinder this I got Miss Portman banished; for my lord was quite another man after she got Miss Helena into the house; and I don't doubt but ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... taken a dram, they got off their horses, and came in and ate some venison, which the women set before them. They were Creoles, half Spanish, half French, with a streak of the Injun; and they spoke a sort of gibberish not easy to understand. But Asa, who had served in Lafayette's division in the time of the war, knew French well; and when they had eaten and drunk, he began to make a bargain with them for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... mean?" demanded the admiral, more concerned than he remembered ever before to have been, on any similar occasion. "One could wish to serve him as much as possible, but all this about 'nullus,' and 'whole blood,' and 'half,' is so much gibberish to me—can you make ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... pay for the satisfaction of bringing even a bad king to the block. Milton's sneer at "vulgar and irrational men, contesting for privileges, customs, forms, and that old entanglement of iniquity, their gibberish laws," is equivalent to an admission that his party had put itself beyond the pale of the law. The only defence would be to show that it had acted under great and overwhelming necessity; but this he takes for granted, though knowing well that ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... frightened, and for some time said nothing, but only stared at me. At length, recovering herself, she exclaimed, in an angry tone, "Why do you talk to me in that manner, and in that gibberish? I don't understand a ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... it any longer; they are completely mad. (Aloud). Once more, I tell you, I understand nothing of all this gibberish; I will be master, and to cut short all kinds of arguments, either you shall both be married shortly, or, upon my word, you shall be ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... doctor—a little slim, narrow-chested man, with a pointed beard and big ears—came and held a mirror to my mouth, and opened one of my veins, and talked a great deal of gibberish, whilst he made countless covert sheep's eyes at the pretty chambermaid, who had taken advantage of his arrival to overhaul my knapsack and help herself from my purse. I distinctly heard the arrangements made for my funeral, and the voice of the landlord saying: 'Yes, ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... of some narrowly escaped danger. "I reckon, tho', when I see them slope up like a covey of red-legged pattridges, my heart was in my mouth, for I looked for nothin' else but that same operation: but I wur just as well pleased, when, after talkin' their gibberish, and makin' all sorts of signs among themselves, they made tracks towards ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... reply in engineering terms was almost gibberish to Tom, but he understood enough of the unit construction to sense that Astro ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... that our blackfellows do not always talk the gibberish with which they are credited ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... whining affected tone, perhaps a corruption of chaunting; some derive it from Andrew Cant, a famous Scotch preacher, who used that whining manner of expression. Also, a kind of gibberish used by thieves and gipseys, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... know not what gibberish thou sayest by 'jim-jams'; but he had, like thee, the wildest fantasies and imaginings; saw snakes, toads, rats, in his boots, but principally rats; said they pursued him, came to his ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... absorption, taking in and assimilating much that contributed to the formation of taste and character. My familiar use of language that sounded pedantic because I got it from books, my frequent references to characters I had known in print, were gibberish and vanity of vanities to my new associates. My very plays were unintelligible to girls who had never heard of William Wallace, and Robert Bruce, and Thaddeus of Warsaw, or read, on Sunday afternoons, of Tobias and the Angel, Judith and Holofernes, and ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... you do it in French or Dutch. What put such nonsense in thy head? I think the French a wicked language anyhow, and I don't see why madam wants thee to jabber any such gibberish." ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... did stunts in the cage at afternoon and evening performances, and the crowd could not keep away from our cage, until pa got hot and unbuttoned his shirt and, before we knew it, everybody saw pa's white skin below where his face and neck were blacked, and while we were talking gibberish to each other a country jake got mad and he led a crowd to open the cage and make us remove our shirts to prove that ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... speak positively to gibberish. The nearest I can go to the word Mrs. Prichard used is"—the doctor paused under the weight of his responsibility for accuracy—"the, nearest, I, can, go is ... spud-clicket." He waited, really anxiously. If, rather than admit a suspicion of the truth, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... exclaimed, "there's a chap with a pair of leather lungs, shouting a lot of gibberish. I suppose he's demanding our surrender, and threatening to blow us to smithereens if ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... of the queerest gestures to me, which I could no more understand than I could make out what his gibberish meant, but when I described his actions to you, you said they meant that Otto was still alive—that is, so far ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... cousin was saying syllables that did not mean anything at all. The other Indians joined in at intervals, speaking gibberish. Aletha's eyes were shining and she looked ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... he lit his pipe again and waited a moment to hear what might be said. "Can you explain such gibberish?" he asked at length, as neither of his listeners spoke. But Henriot said he couldn't. And the wife then took up her own tale of stories that had grown ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... German, Norman French, and sometimes a mixture of all three; back of THEM, they talk Latin, and ancient British, Irish, and Gaelic; and then back of these come billions and billions of pure savages that talk a gibberish that Satan himself couldn't understand. The fact is, where you strike one man in the English settlements that you can understand, you wade through awful swarms that talk something you can't make head ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... return with his choicest gibberish, which did perfectly well to express all the sentiments of fraternal affection he was at that moment experiencing; indeed, no one could have understood him had he spoken Maltese, and few were listening even to what was said, they were all too much occupied either with watching ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... it, with the waves curling in at the cuddy skylights. We tried to signal a barque yesterday, and send home word 'all well'; but the brutes understood nothing but Russian, and excited our indignation by talking 'gibberish ' to us; which we resented with true British spirit, ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... of Mr. Slack's, but of an opposite turn of mind. They were accustomed to make occasional calls upon each other. Dredge was quiet and unassuming, and often allowed Slack to go on with his egotistic gibberish unchecked, which rather encouraged him in ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... tales, Much as when madhouse-inmates crowd around, Make captive any visitor and scream All sorts of stories of their keeper—he's Both dwarf and giant, vulture, wolf, dog, cat, Serpent and scorpion, yet man all the same; Sane people soon see through the gibberish! I just made out, you somehow lived somewhere A life of shame—I can't distinguish more— Married or single—how, don't matter much: Shame which himself had caused—that point was clear, That fact confessed—that thing to hold and keep. Oh, and he added some absurdity ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... the bushes. I've got the man tied back in the still room. I 'low he ain't no revenue but they 'low different. Come back and see if you kin make out his gibberish." ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... raved on, while sentence by sentence a scribe wrote down her gibberish, causing her at last to make her mark to it, all of which took a very long time. At the end she begged that she might be pardoned and not burnt, but this, she was informed, was impossible. Thereon she became enraged and asked why then had she been led to ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... Times, during the American War, was cursed—or cursed its readers—with prophets, seers, and oracles, in its correspondents; and the prophecies turned out to be ridiculously wrong, the seeing to be purblindness, and the oracles to be gibberish. A more miserable exposure could not easily be cited; the most indignant American might afford to pity the Times, when, after four years of leonine roarings and lashings of tail, its roar sank into a whine, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... would not, according to his account, have elapsed, ere the two nations, late such determined enemies, would have been identified by their principles, their maxims, their interests. The full explanation of this gibberish, (for it can be termed no better, even proceeding from the lips of Napoleon,) is to be found elsewhere, when he spoke a language more genuine than that of the Moniteur and the bulletins. "England," he said, "must have ended, by becoming an appendage to the France of my ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... 'Ave Maria!' The lame, or otherwise afflicted, are content with simply directing attention to their misfortunes, while the less 'favoured' attract public regard by humming a wild air, to which a gibberish libretto is attached, or by descanting upon social and political matters. The ill-paved condition of the Cuban streets, the inefficient supply of water, the bad lighting of the town at night, the total absence of anything ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... seed-time in a world all gaunt with ruins. Horrors were there mingled with delicacies and confusion with idyllic peace. It was here a poet's childhood passed amid the crash of war, there an alchemist's old age flickering away amid cobwebs and gibberish. Something jocund and mischievous peeped out even in the cloister; gargoyles leered from the belfry, while ivy and holly grew about the cross. The Middle Ages were the true renaissance. Their Christianity was the theme, the occasion, the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... alternating flicker of rationality, the miser fell back, sputtering, into his previous gibberish, but it took now an arithmetical turn. Eyes closed, he ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Romania, have conversed for centuries in a dialect precisely similar to that spoken at this day, by, the obscure, despised, and wretched people in England, whose language has been considered as a fabricated gibberish, and confounded with a cant in use among thieves and beggars; and whose persons have been, till within the period of a year, an object of the persecution, instead of the ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... confess the pity, Court, country, citadel with city; That ancients, with the giddy young, Should study still the Latin tongue; Should leave to levity, to dolour, The unproficient English scholar; Should give the very stranger dread, Of gibberish, that ne'er was read; That ne'er was heard, without derision, ...
— A Minniature ov Inglish Orthoggraphy • James Elphinston
... my editor believe that I uttered these words, and that the House of Commons listened patiently to them? If he did, what must be thought of his understanding? If he did not, was it the part of an honest man to publish such gibberish as mine? The most charitable supposition, which I therefore gladly adopt, is that Mr Vizetelly saw nothing absurd in the expression which he has attributed to me. The Benares he probably supposes to be some Oriental nation. What he supposes ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... are unreasonable, and want to have all the gibberish to yourself. That you should have it all to yourself in your own pulpit we accede to you; but out here, on the heath, surely I may have my turn. You do not believe in Rumtunshid? Then why should farmer Buttercup be called on to believe in the communion of the saints? What does he ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... another matter. What I said to Mr Adams was on a supposition that he was settled in fact; and indeed, if that was the case, I should doubt."—"Don't tell me your facts and your ifs," said the lady; "I don't understand your gibberish; you take too much upon you, and are very impertinent, in pretending to direct in this parish; and you shall be taught better, I assure you, you shall. But as to the wench, I am resolved she shall not settle here; I will not suffer such beauties as these ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... them into our deepest dungeon," said Lucifer, to the fiends, "and don't starve them; we have here neither cats nor rush-lights to give them, but let them have a toad between them, every ten thousand years, provided they are quiet, and do not deafen us with their gibberish and clibberty clabber." Next to these there came, I should imagine, about thirty husbandmen. Every one was surprised to see so many of them, people of their honest calling seldom coming to Hell; but they were not from the same ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... waited and called, and told and retold her prayer till it turned to gibberish and she began to doubt her own name and to mix the telephone number hopelessly. Then she went into her hand-bag and pawed about in the little pocket edition of confusion till she found the note that Polly had sent her at once from Washington with ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... for this peculiarity, as it was an invention of the author himself, who had taught it to the player. He seems to have considered it as no ordinary invention, and was so pleased with it that he has most painfully printed the speeches of the lawyer in this singular gibberish; and his reasons, as well as his discovery, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... repulsive youth pointed back to the garden, and, laughing hideously, uttered some words in gibberish which were ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... my awakening curiosity. I could see figures moving in an unusual manner, and desired to know what they were doing. I began to walk towards them, and Hans, for his part, began to try to drag me in an opposite direction, uttering all sorts of gibberish as to the necessity of my running away. But I would not be dragged; indeed, I struck at him, until at last, with an exclamation of despair, he let go of ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... nobody knew how. Rumors of cannibalism preceded them, and they were believed to be less than human in form and mind. A Finn might have partly understood their talk, but, to the people they attacked, their speech was gibberish. ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... case of those who view the Indian at a distance and with no precise knowledge of any of his characteristics. In the estimation of such persons the Indian's vices greatly outweigh his virtues; his language is a gibberish, his methods of war cowardly, his ideas of religion ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... sliding panel, and took out an object the size and shape of an aspirin tablet—the sealed unit that permitted him to understand the conversation over the police wave band. Without it, the police calls would have been gibberish. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... call the gibberish to mind?" This was asked earnestly, and made Dr. Nash feel he ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... loud noise, he entered, as was his right and office. There stood the occupant,[59] holding in his hands one of the Chapel Bibles, while before him on the table were placed the images, to which he appeared to be reading, but in reality was vociferating all kinds of senseless gibberish. "What is the meaning of this noise?" inquired the tutor in great anger. "Propagating the Gospel among the Indians, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... as unlike heaven as the wickedest of his flock, will be seen stirring about on his little stage; now carrying a wand—now a brazen pot of smoking "incense," and anon some waxen doll—the image of a saint; while in the midst of his manipulations you may hear him "murmuring" a gibberish of ill-pronounced Latin. If you have witnessed the performance of M. Robin, or the "Great Wizard," you cannot fail to be reminded of ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... no ready stuff to banter with—but no matter, any Gibberish will serve the Fools—'tis now about the hour of Ten—but Twelve is my appointed lucky Minute, when all the Blessings that my Soul could wish, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... have heard nothing," murmured Fritz. "I opened my ears as wide as possible, but it was all in vain. Is it not base and vile to come to Germany and speak this gibberish, not a word of which can be understood? In Germany men should be obliged to ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... however, the figure showed unmistakable signs of life, gesticulating mysteriously, and uttering gibberish, that, although ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... cried Malaga; "it all sounds like gibberish to me. As you thought the sturgeon so excellent at dinner, let me take out the value of the sauce in lessons ...
— A Man of Business • Honore de Balzac
... speak and Elaine, in the highest state of nervous tension, listened, trying to make something of the gibberish mutterings. ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... you are surprised. How do we know? The man Kirski has been twice examined—once in Venice, once this morning, when you went down to the Luisa; the reports the same. What! To have a maniac blundering about the gates, attracting every one's notice by his gibberish; then he is arrested with a pistol or a knife in his hand; he talks nonsense about some Madonna; he is frightened into a confession, and we become the laughing-stock of Europe! Impossible, impossible, ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... ye'd help a fellow-cratur to rise, instead o' talkin' gibberish like that, it would be more to your credit!" exclaimed the Irishman, as he scrambled to his feet and presented himself, along with Martin, at ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... Sirius and Canopus and the far limits of the galaxy was a good Jew like themselves, their peculiar property; He had his earthly headquarters in Jerusalem; spoke, I suppose, only Hebrew, and considered other languages gibberish; of all this earth, was only interested in a tiny corner at the south-east end of the Mediterrancan; and of all the millions of humanity only in the million or two of his Chosen People. I say at once that, considering their history, and the universal decline of the Mysteries, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... anthropological science as intimate as it is unpretentiously expressed. To some good folk in our days, who think that nothing can be profound which is naturally and simply spoken, and who demand that a human philosopher shall speak gibberish and wear his boots on his brows, the fact may be strange, but it is a fact. And it may be added that even if chapter and verse could not thus be produced, a sufficient proof, the most sufficient possible, could be otherwise provided. Scott, by ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... water. Protoplasm can do perfectly well without the one, but water cannot for a moment dispense with the other. Protoplasm, whether living or lifeless, is equally itself; but unaqueous water is unmitigated gibberish. But if protoplasm, although deprived of its vitality, still remains protoplasm, vitality plainly is not indispensable to protoplasm, is not ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... sidewalk Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the top of his harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved and otherwise ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... London, into which they put orators, and the pillory, into which they put writers. Anne spoke a little Danish in her private chats with her husband, and a little French in her private chats with Bolingbroke. Wretched gibberish; but the height of English fashion, especially at court, was to talk French. There was never a bon mot but in French. Anne paid a deal of attention to her coins, especially to copper coins, which are the low and popular ones; she wanted to cut a great figure on them. Six farthings ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... out with a face the color of wet laundry soap. She had crying fits; at times her voice would change, and she'd speak a gibberish that Mr. Meeker declared was Russian; and after a trance she would eat for six. There was nothing about the senior Meeker Lizzie could describe, but she disliked Mrs. Meeker intensely. She made the preposterous statement that the woman could see through the blank walls of the house. Ena ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... purpose; but he speaks others which are by no means Christian. He can talk English, and I myself have heard him chatter in Gitano with the Gypsies of Triana. He is now going amongst the Moors; and when he arrives in their country, you will hear him, should you be there, converse as fluently in their gibberish as in Christiano—nay, better, for he is no Christian himself. He has been several times on board my vessel already; but I do not like him, as I consider that he carries something about with him ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... Paul, I think, answers your question better than I could, but you wouldn't understand even his words, I fancy. There they are in the Greek," he opened a Testament and showed her a passage. "I believe you would think the English almost as great gibberish as this looks to you in ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... the epoch, Andre Chenier, the delicate and superior artist who reopens antique sources of inspiration and starts the modern current, is guillotined; we possess the original manuscript indictment of his examination, a veritable master-piece of gibberish and barbarism, of which a full copy is necessary to convey an idea of its "turpitudes of sense and orthography."[41158] The reader may there see, if he pleases, a man of genius delivered up to brutes, coarse, angry, despotic animals, who listen to nothing, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... away on the shore of Africa, where he was kept in slavery for three years, was, at the expiration of that period, found to be imbruted and stultified—he had lost all reasoning power; and having forgotten his native language, could only utter some savage gibberish between Arabic and English, which nobody could understand, and which even he himself found difficulty in pronouncing. So much for the humanizing influence of THE DOMESTIC INSTITUTION!" Admitting this to have been an extraordinary case of mental deterioration, ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... man arose swiftly, and began folding his blankets. The other one, however,—the one who had wakened uttering gibberish— crossed his hands over his knees, and said: "I don't know ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... not know when the Greek calends are, nor do I want to; my mother spent her time, I thank God, in teaching me to speak the truth, and to be true to my country, and not in teaching me outlandish gibberish." ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... sounded! She could hear everything said, and yet it was in another language, and seemed as if they were mumbling over gibberish, like a couple of children for their own amusement, except that the chief most of the time acted as though he was angry at the white man, who looked so pleasant and kind that she was sure he must have a little ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... not weary, as it should seem," saith Mother Alianora, again with her quiet smile. "Otherwise, to speak thereof should scarcely seem gibberish to her." ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... me; Feele my pulse once again and tell me, Doctor, Tell me in tearmes that I may understand,— I doe not love your gibberish,—tell me honestly Where the Cause lies, and give a Remedy, And that with speed; or in despight of Art, Of Nature, you and all your heavenly motions, Ile recollect so much of life into me As shall give space to see you tortur'd. Some body told me that a Bath ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... Mr. Parris's house during the long winter evenings, telling witchcraft stories to the minister's niece, Elizabeth, nine years old. She draws a circle in the ashes on the hearth, burns a lock of hair, and mutters gibberish. They are incantations to call up the devil and his imps. The girls of the village gather in the old kitchen to hear Tituba's stories, and to mutter words that have no meaning. The girls are Abigail ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... hunting the Black Stone the interest of the problem had helped to keep me going. But now I could see no problem. My mind had nothing to work on but three words of gibberish on a sheet of paper and a mystery of which Sir Walter had been convinced, but to which he couldn't give a name. It was like the story I had read of Saint Teresa setting off at the age of ten with her small brother ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... which he deduced the conclusion that they had not been brought into very intimate contact with the crews of vessels speaking any of those languages. Their own language, on the other hand was, as of course might be expected, merely unintelligible gibberish to him. This was unfortunate, since it would make intelligent communication between him and them difficult, at all events for a time; sailors, however, have a way peculiar to themselves of making their requirements understood by foreigners, and he had little doubt of his ability to overcome ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Indian girl. And old Paloma was squatting at the girl's feet and rubbing the girl's knees and legs like for rheumatism, which I knew the girl didn't have from the way I'd sized up the walk of her, and keeping time to the rubbing with a funny sort of gibberish chant. And I let loose right there and then. As Sarah knows, I never could a-bear women around the house—young, unmarried women, I mean. But it was no go! Old Paloma sided with the girl, and said if the girl went she went, too. Also, she ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... a place of asylum, and frequented by sharpers, of whose gibberish there are several specimens in Shadwell's comedy, "The ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... got fairly to sea, very little thought was wasted on other matters. The captain of the vessel, said that there was "no sea on," or some such gibberish, and talked as if we were becalmed, at the very time that his tipsy old boat was bobbing about like a green rider on a trotting horse. It is a matter of indifference, what sort of metal encased the hearts of those who first tempted the fury of the seas, but they ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... speak robin (which is a quite distinct language not to be mistaken for any other). To speak robin to a robin is like speaking French to a Frenchman. Dickon always spoke it to the robin himself, so the queer gibberish he used when he spoke to humans did not matter in the least. The robin thought he spoke this gibberish to them because they were not intelligent enough to understand feathered speech. His movements also were robin. They never startled one by being sudden enough to seem dangerous ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Gipsy man, 'Meg's true-bred; she's the last in the gang that will start; but she has some queer ways, and often cuts queer words.' With more of this gibberish, they continued the conversation, rendering it thus, even to each other, a dark, obscure dialect, eked out by significant nods and signs, but never expressing distinctly or in plain language the ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... appeared frightened, and for some time said nothing, but only stared at me. At length, recovering herself, she exclaimed, in an angry tone, "Why do you talk to me in that manner, and in that gibberish? I don't understand ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... man by sailing a packet comes to alter his notions about men and things, or, for that matter, about women and things, too. I got into a category, in that schooner, that I never expect to see equalled; for I was driven ashore to windward in her, which is gibberish to you, my dear young lady, but which Mr. Powis will very well understand, though he may not be ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... he talk white man lingo to me, then, instead of his old gibberish that he can't possibly understand himself? Ask the old snoozer what's cooking in that pot. It smells ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... Robin Hood testily, "an ye make sport of me by pattering such gibberish, it will be ill for you all, I tell you. I have the best part of a mind to crack the heads of all four of you, and would do so, too, but for the sweet Malmsey ye have given me. Brother, pass the ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... throw them off their guard. They would never expect that two white people could so speedily turn themselves into niggers. Of course we must pretend to be dumb: though we can talk first-rate nigger gibberish in the berth, it won't pass current, I fear, among ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... and the books you want, to the Arches; they will send them as soon as they can get them, but they do not seem quite familiar to [? with] their names. I have seen Gebor! Gebor aptly so denominated from Geborish, quasi Gibberish. But Gebor hath some lucid intervals. I remember darkly one beautiful simile veiled in uncouth phrases about the youngest daughter of the Ark. I shall have nothing to communicate, I fear, to the Anthology. You shall have some fragments of my play, if you desire them, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... have abundance of names for everything. It cometh, no doubt, from knowing Latin and other outlandish gibberish." ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... he thought: The Knight still repeated, She was an idle Baggage, and bid her go on. Ah Master, says the Gypsie, that roguish Leer of yours makes a pretty Woman's Heart ake; you ha'n't that Simper about the Mouth for Nothing—The uncouth Gibberish with which all this was uttered like the Darkness of an Oracle, made us the more attentive to it. To be short, the Knight left the Money with her that he had crossed her Hand with, and got up again ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. Where the apex was today the second segment is tomorrow; what today can be understood only by the apex and to the rest of the triangle is an incomprehensible gibberish, forms tomorrow the true thought and feeling of ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... not vulgar. He does not belong to the herd. Nothing real, nothing original, can be vulgar; but I should think an imitator of Cobbett a vulgar man. Emery's Yorkshireman is vulgar, because he is a Yorkshireman. It is the cant and gibberish, the cunning and low life of a particular district; it has 'a stamp exclusive and provincial.' He might 'gabble most brutishly' and yet not fall under the letter of the definition; but 'his speech bewrayeth him,' his dialect (like the jargon of a Bond Street lounger) is the damning circumstance. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Like "Neblaretai," an imitative or gibberish word expressing joyous excitement. Aristonumos. Sannurion. Two comic poets, the latter ridiculed by Aristophanes for ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... nothing," murmured Fritz. "I opened my ears as wide as possible, but it was all in vain. Is it not base and vile to come to Germany and speak this gibberish, not a word of which can be understood? In Germany men should be obliged to speak ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... may be of a kind to stimulate one person and to annihilate another. It is not a question of relative strength between character and circumstance, as people are so fond of asserting. That is mere gibberish. It means nothing. The two things cannot be compared, for they are not of the same nature. They can't be reduced to ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... embraced the opportunity to see all the sights he could of the great metropolis. "He had a rum time of it in his sailor rig," said afterward one of his shipmates, "but hoisted in a wonderful deal of gibberish, according to his own ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... arose swiftly, and began folding his blankets. The other one, however,—the one who had wakened uttering gibberish— crossed his hands over his knees, and said: "I don't know ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... watched spellbound, they saw presently the old woman trudge along after her, still muttering the unintelligible gibberish, easily translatable into wrath and fury, whatever ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... absolute monotony, the island of Raza, off Rio Janeiro, was descried, and we slowly entered the harbor, passing a fort on our right hand, from which came a hail, in the Portuguese language, from a huge speaking-trumpet, and our officer of the deck answered back in gibberish, according to a well-understood custom of the place. Sugar-loaf Mountain, on the south of the entrance, is very remarkable and well named; is almost conical, with a slight lean. The man-of-war anchorage is ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... the foremast in his language, and what d'ye think he said? Why, I'm blowed if he didn't call it a 'Mar-darty-marng' (and that's the only bit of French I know); but how is it possible to work a ship in such gibberish?" ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... return anon. If he be intoxicated, see he comes not near my chamber, and permit him not to enter into converse with any one. He raves when drink has touched his brain. He was a rare fellow before a Southron bill laid his brain pan bare; but since that time he talks gibberish whenever the cup has crossed his lips. Said the leech aught to ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... Liancourt. He stalked up to her, and as Liancourt, seeing her rise, rose also and moved away, he said peevishly, "You will never learn to conduct yourself properly; you are to be left here to nurse and comfort your uncle, and not to listen to the gibberish of every French adventurer. Well, Heaven be praised, I have a son—girls are ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... trouble in respect o' washin' and managin' has fell upo' me through the journey—I can't say but what I think as my Lady an' Sir Cristifer's done a right thing by a hinnicent child as doesn't know its right hand from its left, i' bringing it where it'll learn to speak summat better nor gibberish, and be brought up i' the true religion. For as for them furrin churches as Sir Cristifer is so unaccountable mad after, wi' pictures o' men an' women a-showing themselves just for all the world as God made 'em. I think, for ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... the Arabian Geber, who, though he wrote on the perfections of metals, of the new-found art of making gold, in a word, on the philosopher's stone, has only descended to our times as the founder of that jargon which passes under the name of "gibberish." He was, however, a great authority in the middle ages, and allusions to "Geber's cooks," and "Geber's kitchen," are frequent among those who at length saw the error of their ways, after wasting their substance in the vain ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... news of the day, reading as he ate. Then he pushed the paper aside. The thought had just occurred to him that Rochester had paid that eight thousand not to shield a woman's name but to shield his own. To prevent that gibberish being read out against ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Oratorn vorzeiten haben gesagt in ihren Spruchen und Sentenzen, dasz die gedechtniss des Elends und Armuth vorlangst erlitten ist eine grosse Lust.' My friend, said Pantagruel, I have no skill in that gibberish of yours; therefore, if you would have us to understand you, speak to us in some other language. Then did ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... torn and dirty garments and curly hair, screamed and rolled about in the dirt. A red-haired Jew, with freckles all over his face which made him look like a sparrow's egg, gazed from a window. He addressed Yankel at once in his gibberish, and Yankel at once drove into a court-yard. Another Jew came along, halted, and entered into conversation. When Bulba finally emerged from beneath the bricks, he beheld three Jews ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... county fair near here!" exclaimed Rebecca. "But will ye listen to the gibberish an' see ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... swallowin' your meaning," Mazarine said at last. "I never studied Greek. If a woman has a disease, there it is, and you can deal with it or not; but if she hasn't no disease, then it's chicanyery— chicanyery. Doctors talk a lot of gibberish these here days. What I want to know is, has my wife got a disease? I haven't seen any signs. Is it Bright's, or cancer, or the lungs, or the liver, or the kidneys, or the heart, or ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... conversation with two of the crew—Manx sailors—about the Manx language; one, a very tall man, said he knew only a very little of it as he was born on the coast, but that his companion, who came from the interior, knew it well; said it was a mere gibberish. This I denied, and said it was an ancient language, and that it was like the Irish; his companion, a shorter man, in shirt sleeves, with a sharp, eager countenance, now opened his mouth and said I was right, and said that I was the only gentleman whom he ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... common sense and honest hearts, as things natural; that all that was necessary to this end, was first to separate from Christianity all that was not Christianity, and secondly, to translate Christianity out of Latin and Greek, Hebrew and Gibberish, into the ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... came into her adorable eyes, the faint blush that suffused her cheek as she met his inquiring gaze, and the conscious, half conceited, half girlish toss of her little head as she turned her eyes away, and then a file of brown Chinamen, muttering some harsh, uncouth gibberish, interposed between them. This was followed by what seemed to be the crashing in of the church roof, a stifling heat succeeded by a long, deadly chill. But he knew that THIS last was all a dream, and ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... From the mixed gibberish of the voyageur, I could gather his meaning well enough. He knew of a depository of wax-candles, and the church of the rancheria was the place ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... great noise in May. They are loquacious throughout the year, especially on moonlight nights. Nor do they wait for the setting of the sun until they commence to pour forth what Eha terms a "torrent of squeak and chatter and gibberish." ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... once, mumbling to himself some inarticulate gibberish. Half an hour later, the servants came in and found him. He was seated in his chair, still doddering feebly. The house was roused. A doctor was summoned, and the Colonel put to bed. Lady Emily watched him with devoted care. But it was all in vain. The doctor shook his head the moment ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... shrill chatter of the apeman came to his ears. The red ape leader shuffled to his feet and looked from the earth people to the spot in the jungle whence came the chatter. Abruptly he opened his mouth and emitted a flood of gibberish sounds. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... "Hold your outlandish gibberish," returned his lordship. "Go and fetch me some whisky. This stuff is too cold to go to sleep on ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... laughed drily. "We know one another when we meet," he said. He drew his waxed thread between his finger and thumb, held it up to the light, then looked askance at the gossoons about him, to whom what he said was gibberish. They knew ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... he said, "to write under the dictation of a great merchant, conducting a vast correspondence by which thousands of pounds change hands in due course of post. And it's another thing to take down the gibberish of a maundering mad monster who ought to be kept in a cage. Your good father, Valeria, would never have asked ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... help a fellow-cratur to rise, instead o' talkin' gibberish like that, it would be more to your credit!" exclaimed the Irishman, as he scrambled to his feet and presented himself, along with Martin, ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... it went. They sprawled about on the hatches, perched upon the rail, leaned in groups against the vent pipes; they covered the ship like a great brown blanket. They wrestled with each other, knocked each other about, shouted gibberish intended for French, talked about Kaiser Bill, and mixed ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... uninitiated may have, and beat them if it is not granted, or even strangle and kill people. They do not get into trouble for this, because it is thought that they do not know better. Sometimes they carry on the pretence of talking gibberish, and behaving as if they had returned from the spirit-world. After this they are known by another name, peculiar to those who have 'died Ndembo.' . . . We hear of the custom far along on the upper river, as well as ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... him as a creature apart, and one whom many are prone erroneously to classify very low in the human scale and not far above the ape. Sir Lucien usually spoke to Sin Sin Wa in English, and the other replied in that weird jargon known as "pidgin." But the silly Sin Wa who murmured gibberish and the Sin Sin Wa who could converse upon many and curious subjects in his own language were two different beings—as Sir Lucien was aware. Now, as the one-eyed Chinaman resumed his seat and the one-eyed raven sank into ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... you, Heiny, so long as I give you a bit of sugar now and then?" he said to his decrepit old guardian in his German gibberish. ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... performances, and the crowd could not keep away from our cage, until pa got hot and unbuttoned his shirt and, before we knew it, everybody saw pa's white skin below where his face and neck were blacked, and while we were talking gibberish to each other a country jake got mad and he led a crowd to open the cage and make us remove our shirts to ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... weary, as it should seem," saith Mother Alianora, again with her quiet smile. "Otherwise, to speak thereof should scarcely seem gibberish to her." ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... war to all the belligerents, whether few or many. More often than not, it is brought about by the exulting chatter of a few irrepressible and also irresponsible individuals who have military or political ambitions to look after, and no other faculty of reason or vocabulary than the gibberish "that war will clear the air." They ostentatiously claim a monopoly of patriotism; and convey their views on war matters with a blustering levity which is a marvel to the astonished soul. Their attitude towards human ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... and cask, and placed in the stern of the boat. The crew were swarthy fellows with red caps, and Dick at once saw that the uniform worn by the officers in command was neither English nor French. They appeared to be talking gibberish, but such indeed were all foreign languages to him. He asked Charley if it was the ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... and we could find no broken bones. Apparently there was nothing the matter beyond fear, and of that he was nearly dead. He crawled to the Colonel and clung to his feet chattering an unintelligible gibberish. His eyes rolling wildly in the dim light, showed an uncanny yellow gleam. I could see where he got ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... off in a leisurely manner, evidently in no fear. They were the first we had seen, and Hector was all excitement. He spoke rapidly to the two Bushmen who were with us, and then shouted some clicking, unintelligible gibberish after the retreating animals. At the call the whole troop halted, and their hoarse barks came back in reply. Again Hector shouted, and once again the baboons voiced a grunting mocking answer that John and I looked at each other in amazement! ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... Such progress as Pin might make—if she were not already glued firm to her silly notions—would be in quite another direction. For the quarrel had made one thing plain to Laura: with regard to her troubles, she need not look to Pin for sympathy: if Pin talked such gibberish at the hint of putting off an inquisitive old woman, what would she—and not she alone—what would they all say to the tissue of lies Laura had spun round Mr. Shepherd, a holy man, a clergyman, and a personal friend of Mother's into the bargain? She could not blink the fact that, did it come to ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... a-jumping on his shoulders, and swinging themselves to the ground by his long hair. Some was running hot irons into him, but when we came up they went off in a corner, laughing and talking like wildcats' gibberish ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... whisht! Or whisht yer blethers!—whichever way that outlandish, heathenish gibberish your forebears jabbered, would have it. You see, Archie, one great advantage of being Irish—and it's not your fault that you're not, man, I don't blame you—one great advantage is that you can speak all languages with equal ease. Now a Scotchman's tongue is like his sense of ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... possessed as much liberty as they could lay hands on between the Tower of London, into which they put orators, and the pillory, into which they put writers. Anne spoke a little Danish in her private chats with her husband, and a little French in her private chats with Bolingbroke. Wretched gibberish; but the height of English fashion, especially at court, was to talk French. There was never a bon mot but in French. Anne paid a deal of attention to her coins, especially to copper coins, which are the low and popular ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... of what it is in the case of those who view the Indian at a distance and with no precise knowledge of any of his characteristics. In the estimation of such persons the Indian's vices greatly outweigh his virtues; his language is a gibberish, his methods of war cowardly, his ideas of religion ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... understand your gibberish, my good man: but that you are unrefined and uneducated I can easily see, and I command you ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... burnt on me, his tales, Much as when madhouse-inmates crowd around, Make captive any visitor and scream All sorts of stories of their keeper—he's Both dwarf and giant, vulture, wolf, dog, cat, Serpent and scorpion, yet man all the same; Sane people soon see through the gibberish! I just made out, you somehow lived somewhere A life of shame—I can't distinguish more— Married or single—how, don't matter much: Shame which himself had caused—that point was clear, That fact confessed—that thing to hold and keep. Oh, and he added some ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... was cast away on the shore of Africa, where he was kept in slavery for three years, was, at the expiration of that period, found to be imbruted and stultified—he had lost all reasoning power; and having forgotten his native language, could only utter some savage gibberish between Arabic and English, which nobody could understand, and which even he himself found difficulty in pronouncing. So much for the humanizing influence of THE DOMESTIC INSTITUTION!" Admitting this to have been an extraordinary ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... part of the nose; and they all twist kangaroo teeth and the bones of fishes more or less in their hair. Every thing small and diminutive they call "Pickaninnie," and any thing very good, "Merri jig." Their language is a queer, rattling, hard-sounding gibberish, incomprehensible to most people; they speak as fast as possible, laugh immoderately at trifles, and are excellent mimics. Their own ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... broken. The Great Charter and the praters who appeal to it will be hanged in one rope. The good Talbot will shower commissions on his countrymen, and will cut the throats of the English. These verses, which were in no respect above the ordinary standard of street poetry, had for burden some gibberish which was said to have been used as a watchword by the insurgents of Ulster in 1641. The verses and the tune caught the fancy of the nation. From one end of England to the other all classes were constantly singing this idle rhyme. It was especially the delight of the English army. More ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... student days—and discovering a shabbily bright foreign quarter, shops displaying Hebrew placards and weird, unfamiliar commodities and a concourse of bright-eyed, eagle-nosed people talking some incomprehensible gibberish between the shops and the barrows. And soon I became quite familiar with the devious, vicious, dirtily-pleasant eroticism of Soho. I found those crowded streets a vast relief from the dull grey exterior ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Aunt Mary told Lucinda, when they were left together once more. "She puts me beyond all patience. She chatters gibberish that I can't make out a word of for an hour at a time, and then, all of a sudden, she screams, 'Dinner's ready,' or something equally silly, in a voice like a carvin' knife. It's enough to drive a sane person stark, ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... neare me; Feele my pulse once again and tell me, Doctor, Tell me in tearmes that I may understand,— I doe not love your gibberish,—tell me honestly Where the Cause lies, and give a Remedy, And that with speed; or in despight of Art, Of Nature, you and all your heavenly motions, Ile recollect so much of life into me As shall give space to see you tortur'd. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... amongst the King's game; but by means of a sling, not of a bow; like the Hermit, too, he has his peculiar phrases of compotation, the sign and countersign being Passelodion and Berafriend. One can scarce conceive what humour our ancestors found in this species of gibberish; but "I warrant it proved ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... earnest, prays so heartily for himself, with such a sense of his own spiritual need and spiritual failings, that each one of his hearers feels as if a prayer and a supplication had gone up for each of them. Even Nattee muttered the few words she knew of the Lord's Prayer; gibberish though the disjointed nouns and verbs might be, the poor creature said them because she was stirred to unwonted reverence. As for Lois, she rose up comforted and strengthened, as no special prayers of Pastor Tappau had ever made her feel. But Faith was sobbing, sobbing ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... detailed reply in engineering terms was almost gibberish to Tom, but he understood enough of the unit construction to sense that Astro ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... style, detractors who could see nothing but nonsense in his matter. He will now have judges. Posterity will pronounce its calm and impartial decision; and that decision will, we firmly believe, place in the same rank with Galileo, and with Locke, the man who found jurisprudence a gibberish and left it a science. Never was there a literary partnership so fortunate as that of Mr Bentham and M. Dumont. The raw material which Mr Bentham furnished was most precious; but it was unmarketable. He was, assuredly, at once a great logician and a great rhetorician. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... why the great scientist has endeavoured to speak like other people, preferring, to the harsh consonants of technical phrases which sound "like insults" or have the air of "a magical invocation, which make certain scientific works read like so much gibberish," the "naive and picturesque appellation, the familiar, trivial name, the popular, living term which directly interprets the exact signification of the habits of an insect, or informs us fully of its dominant characteristic, or which, at ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... gaunt with ruins. Horrors were there mingled with delicacies and confusion with idyllic peace. It was here a poet's childhood passed amid the crash of war, there an alchemist's old age flickering away amid cobwebs and gibberish. Something jocund and mischievous peeped out even in the cloister; gargoyles leered from the belfry, while ivy and holly grew about the cross. The Middle Ages were the true renaissance. Their Christianity was the theme, the occasion, the excuse for their art and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... taken aback and declared to the public almost with one accord that the writer's eccentricities had developed into mannerisms, that his theories of life were political manifestoes, that his dialects were gibberish, and his defiance of the orthodox canons of autobiography scarcely less than an ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... society in France, with all the self-complacency of besotted ignorance and provincial superciliousness. Searching out a place to his mind, this profound observer of men and manners, who had studied a foreign people, whose language when spoken was gibberish to him, by travelling five days in a public coach, and living four weeks in taverns and eating-houses, besides visiting three theatres, in which he did not understand a single word that was uttered, proceeded ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... himself with a bold bang on the door, followed by the pious ejaculation, 'Ave Maria!' The lame, or otherwise afflicted, are content with simply directing attention to their misfortunes, while the less 'favoured' attract public regard by humming a wild air, to which a gibberish libretto is attached, or by descanting upon social and political matters. The ill-paved condition of the Cuban streets, the inefficient supply of water, the bad lighting of the town at night, the total absence of anything like proper drainage, ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... of bearing which the French call ARMOIRES PARLANTES; the Latins ARMA CANTANTIA; and your English authorities, canting heraldry; being indeed a species of emblazoning more befitting canters, gaberlunzies, and such-like mendicants, whose gibberish is formed upon playing upon the word, than the noble, honourable, and useful science of heraldry, which assigns armorial bearings as the reward of noble and generous actions, and not to tickle the ear with vain quodlibets, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... only what my eyes beheld, for I can make nothing out of their heathen gibberish. Yet she who journeyed with us, ever proving herself a modest, high-bred lady in times of sore trial, begged upon her knees, with tears hot upon her cheeks, to be permitted to accompany you and her husband. What result? Why, this ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... been careful to buy a young one that could not speak, for he knew the Morris boys would not want one chattering foreign gibberish, nor yet one that would swear. He had kept her in his bunk in the ship, and had spent all his leisure time in teaching her to talk. Then he looked at her anxiously, and said, "Show off ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... like a turn at frogging, and Josef, with Indian wordlessness, handed the net to him. Whereupon, with his flabby mouth wide and his large gray eyes gleaming, he proceeded to miss four easy ones in succession. And with that Josef, in a gibberish which is French-Canadian patois of the inner circles, addressed the Tin Lizzie and took away the net from him, asking no orders from me. The Lizzie, pipe in mouth as always, smiled just as pleasantly under this punishment as in the ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... eager to share Miss Keene's sentiments; "and he's so good to those outlandish niggers in the crew. I don't see how the captain could get on with the crew without him; he's the only one who can talk their gibberish and keep them quiet. I've seen him myself quietly drop down among them when they were wrangling. In my opinion," continued the young fellow, lowering his voice somewhat ostentatiously, "you'll find out when we get to ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... he cut in doing so, I shall not easily forget. He held it out at arm's length, grinned at it most horribly, and chattered some abominable gibberish in Tartaree, that no one understood, appearing to expect every moment that the glass would bite him. After some minutes spent in this way, he drew it near him, and by degrees became more confident. Buctoo then approached him and set it, telling him ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... these. That we eat Christ's body in the Eucharist is a belief that, in a practical way, can be understood perfectly by anyone; but the philosophy that is involved in this belief would be to most men the merest gibberish. Yet it is no more unimportant that those who do understand this philosophy, should do so truly and transmit it faithfully, than it is unimportant that a physician should understand the action of alcohol, because anyone independent of such ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... the Magnifico and his poetic satellites; while the women, over and above any relish of the fun, really began to have an itch for the Brevi. Several couples had already gone through the ceremony, in which the conjuror's solemn gibberish and grimaces over the open book, the antics of the monkey, and even the preliminary spitting, had called forth peals of laughter; and now a well-looking, merry-eyed youth of seventeen, in a loose tunic and ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... If we can prove in evidence that he is not settled in fact, it is another matter. What I said to Mr Adams was on a supposition that he was settled in fact; and indeed, if that was the case, I should doubt."—"Don't tell me your facts and your ifs," said the lady; "I don't understand your gibberish; you take too much upon you, and are very impertinent, in pretending to direct in this parish; and you shall be taught better, I assure you, you shall. But as to the wench, I am resolved she shall not settle here; I will not suffer such beauties as these to produce children for us to keep."—"Beauties, ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... to write Philomath after his name, and whose whole extent of literary reputation is not more than two or three beggarly townlands, whom, by the way, he is inoculating successfully wid his own ripe and flourishing ignorance. No, sir; nor like Gusty Gibberish, or (as he has been most facetiously christened by his Reverence, Father O'Flaherty) Demosthenes M'Gosther, inasmuch as he is distinguished for an aisy and prodigal superfluity of mere words, unsustained by intelligibility or meaning, but who cannot claim in his own person a mile and a half of dacent ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... works of the poetical monarch, I may have altered some of the words of the quotation; but the rhymes sauce and rose I aver to be true to the primitive copy. Even Protestant refugees, born of French parents, brought up amongst their co-religionists and countrymen, wrote a strange gibberish, often ungrammatical, always unidiomatic, of which traces may be found even in Basnage and Ancillon. A recent French theologian, the clever author of a Life of Spinosa, written in Germany and published in Paris with some success, has such ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... passage of sheer gibberish; then a dialogue of the noblest and most dramatic eloquence; then a chaotic alternation of sense and nonsense, bad Italian and mixed English, abject farce and dignified rhetoric, spirited simplicity and bombastic jargon. It would be more and less than just ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Malaga; "it all sounds like gibberish to me. As you thought the sturgeon so excellent at dinner, let me take out the value of the ...
— A Man of Business • Honore de Balzac
... thou art 'ware of," I soliloquised as I watched his retreating figure, whilst lighting my pipe. "As the other philosopher, Tycho Brahe, found inspiration in the gibberish of his idiot companion, so do I find food for reflection in thy casual courtesy, my friend. Possibly I have reached the highest point of all my greatness, and from that full meridian of my glory, I haste now to my setting. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... and he observed that my lord and my lady were coming together more than they used to be since Miss Portman left the house. To which Champfort replied with an oath, like an unmannered reprobate as he is, and in his gibberish, French and English, which I can't speak; but the sense of it was this:—'My lord and lady shall never come together, if I can help it. It was to hinder this I got Miss Portman banished; for my lord was quite another man after she got Miss ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... America, and which provoked Caesar's laughter. He was constantly saying: "My friend," and he mingled Gallicisms with a lot of coarse expressions of Indian or mulatto origin, and with Italian words. Preciozi's dialect was a gibberish worthy of Babel. ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... dragged out with a face the color of wet laundry soap. She had crying fits; at times her voice would change, and she'd speak a gibberish that Mr. Meeker declared was Russian; and after a trance she would eat for six. There was nothing about the senior Meeker Lizzie could describe, but she disliked Mrs. Meeker intensely. She made the preposterous ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... his breakfast of mealy porridge, but he won't admit that it is to be called "paniche," preferring his own word "scoff;" so he shakes his head violently and says, "Nay, nay, paniche." Then, with many nods, "Scoff, ja;" and so in this strange gibberish of three languages he and the Frenchman carry on quite a pretty quarrel. Charlie also "mocks himself" of the other servants, I am informed, and asserts that he is the "indema" or headman. He freely boxes the ears of Jack, the Zulu refugee—poor Jack, who fled from his own ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... well; but his Irish gibberish is as Greek to me. All that I can make out is what ...
— Live to be Useful - or, The Story of Annie Lee and her Irish Nurse • Anonymous
... of wood rending and splitting,—as with a great broadaxe,—and a medley of blocks and ropes rattled to the deck with the 'thud of the falling bodies. Then, instead of stillness, moans and shrieks from above and below, oaths and prayers in English and French and Portuguese, and in the heathen gibberish of the East. As the men were sponging and ramming home in the first fury of hatred, the carpenter jumped out under the battle-lanthorn at the main hatch, crying in a wild voice that the old eighteens had burst, killing half their crews and blowing up the gundeck above them. At this many of our ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... tail Kikuyu winds energetically back and forth on his little handle, and tries to keep his feet. And Brown! he is magnificent! His long lash sends out a volley of rifle reports, down, up, ahead, back; his cracked voice roars out an unending stream of apparent gibberish. Back and forth along the line of the team he skips nimbly, the sweat streaming from his face. And the oxen plod along, unhasting, unexcited, their eyes dreamy, chewing the cud of yesterday's philosophic reflections. The situation conveys the general impression of a peevish little stream breaking ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... as told by contemporaries and repeated from that day to this. It is hardly necessary to say that Barneveld calmly denied having conceived or even heard of the scheme. That men could go about looking each other in the face and rehearsing such gibberish would seem sufficiently dispiriting did we not know to what depths of credulity men in all ages can sink when possessed by the demon ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... dear, for pity's sake! I never could understand that gibberish. My poor father paid extra for me to learn under a native, but it seemed as if I always turned against it. Well, I don't understand about the cabbages; Gertrude certainly said they were quite sour, and mixed with ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... me. Latin was my favorite study, and it seemed sacrilege to believe this gibberish to belong to the country ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... some pulling of caps soon, Hazel said to-day, in her gibberish. I couldn't think what ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... captain. 'What's that you say? Oh, that's no English; I'll have none of your highway gibberish on my ship. We'll call you old Uncle Ned, because you've got no wool on the top of your head, just the place where the wool ought to grow. Step to port, Uncle. Don't you hear Mr Hay has picked you? Then I'll take the ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... woman broke off her speech, or chant, which was so much musical gibberish to us, for all that we understood of what she was talking about, and seemed to fix her flashing eyes upon the deep shadow before her. Then in a moment they acquired a vacant, terrified stare, as though they ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... lose it; to feel an interest in rheumatism, an awe of bronchitis; to tell anecdotes, and to wear flannel. To you in strict confidence I disclose the truth: I am no longer twenty-five. You laugh; this is civilized talk: does it not refresh you after the gibberish you must have chattered in ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... should stow him; and if he was discovered, to say that he was one of the house, and leave him to make it good. "You will hear what the gallants say," he added; "but I think thou wilt carry away but little on it; for when it is not French, it is Court gibberish; and that is as hard ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... to Mr. Verdant Green, who, at first, imagined that he was required to seize it by its red-hot end, but was greatly relieved in his mind when he found that he had merely to take it by the handle, and repeat (as well as he could) a form of gibberish that Mr. Blades dictated. Having done this he was desired to transfer the poker to the Past Grand Hodman - ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... taking my French lessons with my good old Crebillon; yet my style, which was full of Italianisms, often expressed the very reverse of what I meant to say. But generally my 'quid pro quos' only resulted in curious jokes which made my fortune; and the best of it is that my gibberish did me no harm on the score of wit: on the contrary, it procured me ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... I said, "is gibberish; mere words. Would it bring Clayte up before any one who had never seen him? Ask Captain Gilbert, who doesn't know the man. I say that's a list of the points at which he resembles every third office man you meet on ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... being then fairly inoffensive for the first time since the height of the storm. But the other boats simply took what the lifeboat left. The guaranteed identity of the lifeboat, and of the Norsemen (who replied to questions in gibberish), and of Simeon himself; the sou'westers, the life-belts and the lines; even the collection for the Lifeboat Fund at the close of the voyage: all these matters resolved themselves into a fascination which Llandudno could ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... me to learn to cut capers?-and dress like a monkey?-and palaver in French gibberish?-hey, would you?-And powder, and daub, and make myself ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... doubt it any longer; they are completely mad. (Aloud). Once more, I tell you, I understand nothing of all this gibberish; I will be master, and to cut short all kinds of arguments, either you shall both be married shortly, or, upon my word, you shall be ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... Monk" and suchlike anti-papal pornography, I doubt if there will be any Protestants left among the irresponsible rich. Those who do not follow the main current will probably take up with weird science-denouncing sects of the faith-healing type, or with such pseudo-scientific gibberish as Theosophy. Mrs. Piper (in an inelegant attitude and with only the whites of her eyes showing) has restored the waning faith of Professor James in human immortality, and I do not see why that lady should stick at one dogma amidst the present quite insatiable demand for creeds. ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... can recognise," he said after a pause, as if thinking over all the dialects he had ever come across in his wanderings. "The poor chap has evidently gone mad and is jabbering some gibberish or other. Look how his ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... already knew the contents had now to be stuttered in a strange gibberish, in which a certain snuffle and gargle were not a little commended as something unattainable, I in a certain degree deviated from the matter, and diverted myself, in a childish way, with the singular names of these accumulated signs. ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... absurd little creatures. Good-looking they are—you are a fine-looking man yourself, and your wife was certainly pretty—the children take after you both. I have nothing to say against their appearance; but they talk utter gibberish; and as to that eldest little girl, if she is not given something sensible to occupy her I cannot answer for the consequence. My dear David, I don't want ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... it was a shame to me, then, that I used that secrecy," said his mother, with a flash of new anger. "There is no shame attaching to me. I have no reason to be ashamed. I rid myself of the Jewish tatters and gibberish that make people nudge each other at sight of us, as if we were tattooed under our clothes, though our faces are as whole as theirs. I delivered you from the pelting contempt that pursues Jewish separateness. I am not ashamed that I did it. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... narrow-chested man, with a pointed beard and big ears—came and held a mirror to my mouth, and opened one of my veins, and talked a great deal of gibberish, whilst he made countless covert sheep's eyes at the pretty chambermaid, who had taken advantage of his arrival to overhaul my knapsack and help herself from my purse. I distinctly heard the arrangements made for my funeral, and the voice of the landlord ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... there was none to see. Children are even content to forego what we call the realities, and prefer the shadow to the substance. When they might be speaking intelligibly together, they chatter senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy because they are making believe to speak French. I have said already how even the imperious appetite of hunger suffers itself to be gulled and led by the nose with the fag ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you.'' At this Howell said with the most humble suavity, "Do I understand that the distinguished gentleman does not recognize what I have been reading?'' The preacher answered, "I don't understand any such gibberish; speak English.'' Thereupon Howell threw back his long black hair and launched forth into eloquent denunciation as follows: "Sir, is it possible that you come here to interpret to us the Holy Bible ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... beautiful dark-haired foreign lady, too—she is more fascinating to study than all the rest. She must be a Russian from her colouring, and, besides, she wears those wonderful embroideries. And her servants, too, talk some outlandish gibberish among themselves. Of course she belongs to the nobility, you can see that, even ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... person, are set apart for virtue. The ears of the people of England are distinguishing. They hear these men speak broad. Their tongue betrays them. Their language is in the patois of fraud, in the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy. The people of England must think so, when these praters affect to carry back the clergy to that primitive evangelic poverty which in the spirit ought always to exist in them, (and in us, too, however we may like it,) but in the thing must be varied, when the relation of that body to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... as never knows beasts unless they're called out o' their names. Put 'em in Sunday clothes, and you know 'em, but in their work-a-day English you never know nought about 'em. I've met wi' many o' your kidney; and if I'd ha' known it, I'd ha' christened poor Jack's mermaid wi' some grand gibberish of a name. Mermaidicus Jack Harrisensis; that's just like their new-fangled words. D'ye believe there's such a thing as the Mermaidicus, master?" asked Will, enjoying his own joke uncommonly, ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... fix the rinds of scooped oranges . . . ! particularly while dangling the censers they keep shaking them in derision, and letting the ashes fly about their heads and faces, one against the other. In this equipage they neither sing hymns nor psalms nor masses, but mumble a certain gibberish as shrill and squeaking as a herd of pigs whipped on to market. The nonsense verses ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... comprehend it to the probability that his mind was impaired by disease; and thrusting the book into the hands of his wife he entreated her to read it at once. He watched her breathlessly, and when she exclaimed, "I don't know what this means; it is gibberish," Jerrold exclaimed, "Thank God, I am ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... understand the gibberish of squires and knights-errant, and did nothing but eat, hold their peace, and stare at their guests, who with great relish were gorging themselves with pieces as big as their fists. The course of flesh being over, the goatherds spread on the skins a great number of parched acorns and half a ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... knew and thoroughly despised the character of this man, "none of your cogging gibberish; tell me truly, are you at ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... entreaty. And he began with a flood of speech to tell me how near he was to his end, with a number of outlandish, magical words such as "the great Magisterium," "the Red Lion," "the Red Tincture," and the like, till meseemed my brain reeled with the sinful gibberish; notwithstanding, to this day I believe that in all truth he was nigh attaining his purpose; and he might have done so at last were it not that, a short space after this, he was choked by the vapor from an alembic ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... nothing matters," he observed. "And perhaps there is a grain of freakishness in my nature. It amused me to go about uttering silly, commonplace phrases. I was never so well thought of in the islands till I began to jabber commercial gibberish like the veriest idiot. Upon my word, I believe that I was actually respected for a time. I was as grave as an owl over it; I had to be loyal to the man. I have been, from first to last, completely, utterly loyal ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... forest, how sweetly he talkt; And how perfectly well he appeared, DOLL, to know All the life and adventures of JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU?— "'Twas there," said he—not that his words I can state— 'Twas a gibberish that Cupid alone could translate;— But "there," said he, (pointing where, small and remote, The dear Hermitage rose), "there his JULIE he wrote,— "Upon paper gilt-edged, without blot or erasure; ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... and want to have all the gibberish to yourself. That you should have it all to yourself in your own pulpit we accede to you; but out here, on the heath, surely I may have my turn. You do not believe in Rumtunshid? Then why should farmer ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... an ibis, and write certain characters on it in the blood of a black ram, and go to a cross-road, or the sea-shore, or a river-bank at midnight: there you recite gibberish and then see a pretty lady riding a donkey, and she will put off her beauty like a mask and assume the appearance of old age, and will promise to obey you: ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... Empiricis), written probably near the end of the fourth century. This work contains, amongst other things, a number of word-charms, or superstitious cure-formulas, that were, till lately, regarded—like Cato's word-cure for fractures of the bones—as mere unmeaning gibberish. Joseph Grimm and M. Pictet, however, think that they have found in these word-charms of Marcellus, specimens of the Gaulish or Celtic language several centuries older than any that were previously known to exist—none ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... when a scratching, scraping, boring noise on the outside of their bark roof temporarily disturbed their slumbers. Dol called out noisily, and, as was the way of that youngster on sundry occasions, talked some gibberish in his sleep. ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... again Marie Louise waited and called, and told and retold her prayer till it turned to gibberish and she began to doubt her own name and to mix the telephone number hopelessly. Then she went into her hand-bag and pawed about in the little pocket edition of confusion till she found the note that Polly had sent her at once from Washington ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... to me nothing but truth and sense. I answered him just as roughly as I did the rest, who jabbered mere gibberish. I couldn't make distinctions there and then. His appearance told what he had gone through lately clearer than his words; but where is the use of explaining? ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... veer, veer; gentle gallants, gentle gallants! Wind, I see him! Wind, I see him! Pourbossa, pourbossa! Haul all and one!'" When the anchor was hauled above the water they cried: "Caupon, caupon; caupon, cola; caupon holt; Sarrabossa!" When setting sail they began with the same kind of gibberish. "Hou! Hou! Pulpela, Pulpela! Hard out strife! Before the wind! God send! God send! Fair weather! Many Prizes! Many Prizes! Stow! Stow! Make fast and belay—Heisa! Heisa! One long pull! One long pull! Young blood! More mud! There, there! Yellow ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... meantime, St. Paul, I think, answers your question better than I could, but you wouldn't understand even his words, I fancy. There they are in the Greek," he opened a Testament and showed her a passage. "I believe you would think the English almost as great gibberish as this looks to you ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... again said lightly, "any American—any, that is, of the world—who has a colonial background for his family, has thought, probably, very much the same sort of things. Of course it would be all Greek or gibberish ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... abuse they can not avoid hearing. In cases of violent sick headache we often miscall objects without detecting it ourselves, and in delirium the speech mechanism works from violent organic discharges altogether without control. The senile old man talks nonsense—so-called gibberish—thinking he is ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... and trouble. Look at the handsome guard in his silver-plated harness. How much nicer he is than a gabbling Italian, or a Frenchman who compliments you one minute and behaves like a brute the next! It does my soul good to see the clean, rosy faces, and hear good English instead of gibberish.' ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... Sunday in the tow of Cooper, who soon became a branch pilot in those waters about the parks and the West End, the Monument, St. Paul's and the lions; Cooper took a look at the arsenal, jewels, and armory [Tower of London]. He had a rum time of it in his sailor's rig; hoisted in a wonderful lot of gibberish." And with his fine stories of each day's sights in old London town, the young sailor would make merry evenings for his forecastle comrades, of whom it is recorded his strength could lay flat on their backs in ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... in return with his choicest gibberish, which did perfectly well to express all the sentiments of fraternal affection he was at that moment experiencing; indeed, no one could have understood him had he spoken Maltese, and few were listening even to what was said, they were all too much occupied either with watching ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... under the sun," said Harkaway. "It's my opinion he has got the cheek to talk regular right-down gibberish to us." ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... the soldier, "and I have got no pass-word. I could not speak a syllable of their salvage gibberish, an it were to save me ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... (according to the usually accepted view) "Larrikin" from "larking." But the former explanation is the more probable. There is no connection with soldiers' "barracks;" nor is it likely that there is any, as has been ingeniously suggested, with the French word baragouin, gibberish. ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... went on Drysdale. "I thought old Murdock would have wept on his neck. As it was, he scattered snuff enough to fill a pint pot over him out of his mull, and began talking Gaelic. And Blake had the cheek to jabber a lot of gibberish back to him, as if he ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... epoch, Andre Chenier, the delicate and superior artist who reopens antique sources of inspiration and starts the modern current, is guillotined; we possess the original manuscript indictment of his examination, a veritable master-piece of gibberish and barbarism, of which a full copy is necessary to convey an idea of its "turpitudes of sense and orthography."[41158] The reader may there see, if he pleases, a man of genius delivered up to brutes, coarse, angry, despotic animals, who listen to nothing, who comprehend ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... young man, a dentist and doctor, claiming to come from an eastern city, while sitting at the table last evening, after much insane gibberish, fell back intoxicated upon the floor, and lay insensible for some time. He was finally, when the others had finished eating, dragged off to bed in a most inglorious condition, to suffer later for his dissipation. O, how my heart ached for his dear old mother so far away! If she had seen ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... religion. This is not wonderful, since the Koran is never translated, and a very extraordinary desire for knowledge would be required to sustain a man in committing to memory pages and chapters of, to him, unmeaning gibberish. One only of all the native chiefs, Monyumgo, has sent his children to Zanzibar to be taught to read and write the Koran; and he is said to possess an unusual admiration of such civilization as he has seen among the Arabs. To the natives, the chief attention ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... Poknees. ''Tis our own language, sir,' I tells him, 'we did not steal it.' 'Shall I tell you what it is, my good woman?' says the Poknees. 'I would thank you, sir,' says I, 'for 'tis often we are asked about it.' 'Well, then,' says the Poknees, 'it is no language at all, merely a made-up gibberish.' 'Oh, bless your wisdom,' says I, with a curtsey, 'you can tell us what our language is without understanding it!' Another time we meet a parson. 'Good woman,' says he, 'what's that you are talking? Is it broken language?' 'Of course, your ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... "your friends are all heroes, Pegtop—will Mr Wagtail fight also?" He stole close up to me, and exchanged his smart Creole gibberish for a quiet sedate ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Ages, and almost, though probably not quite unknown, to the civilized peoples of the Mediterranean in ancient times. The history of the two words is interesting. The Greek word [Greek: barbaros], whence Eng. barbarian (Sanskrit barbara, Latin balbus), means "a stammerer," or one who talks gibberish, i. e. in a language we do not understand. Aristophanes (Aves, 199) very prettily applies the epithet to the inarticulate singing of birds. The names Welsh, Walloon, Wallachian, and Belooch, given to these peoples by their neighbours, ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... a way much surer; for we cheat in no language at all, but loll in our own coaches, eloquent in gibberish, and learned in jingle. Pull out the parchment [referring to the will of LORD BRUMPTON], there's the deed; I made it as long as I could. Well, I hope to see the day when the indenture shall be the ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... living thing to do the skipping and dodging, that I could see. And there were voices all about me—some on this side, others on that; some close at my ear, and others far away—all talking the strangest gibberish, and not the sign of a living thing to do the ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... "What gibberish is this?" said the lady, in fretful humor; "go and tell your master to come here this moment. I declare, my nerves are all a-tremble, and my life is worried out of me by these stupid niggers. Get out of my sight, ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... mingle-mangle talk," ordered Mr. Meredith, fretfully. "Is 't not enough to have French gibberish in the world, without—" ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... were not required of the Laureate of George I., who understood little or no English, there can be no question. George II. was equally insensible to the Muses; and had the annual lyrics been a mosaic of the merest gibberish, they would have satisfied his earlier tastes as thoroughly as the odes of Collins or Gray. A court, at which Pope and Swift, Young and Thomson were strangers, had precisely that share of Augustan splendor which enabled such ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... shouted at her, and then some unintelligible gibberish. But she took no more notice of him than if he had been a crow on a branch. In a minute she was beside Will, talking to him, and from over the top of the rise we could hear Fred ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... make a great noise in May. They are loquacious throughout the year, especially on moonlight nights. Nor do they wait for the setting of the sun until they commence to pour forth what Eha terms a "torrent of squeak and chatter and gibberish." ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... is this?" he evidently tried to say, "that these people are all the time jabbering? It is nothing but an unmeaning chattering of monkeys. Can it be possible that they know what they are babbling? And you understand that gibberish, too?" ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... the Centaur another boy with the small blue-eyed person in whom he took delight. And this fat and indolent looking boy informed them that he and the girl who was with him were walking in the glaze of the red mustard jar, which Jurgen thought was gibberish: and the fat boy said that he and the girl had decided never to grow any older, which Jurgen said was excellent good sense if only they could ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... administration of the law to Judge Lynch—rather too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of bringing even a bad king to the block. Milton's sneer at "vulgar and irrational men, contesting for privileges, customs, forms, and that old entanglement of iniquity, their gibberish laws," is equivalent to an admission that his party had put itself beyond the pale of the law. The only defence would be to show that it had acted under great and overwhelming necessity; but this he takes for granted, though ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... Horrors were there mingled with delicacies and confusion with idyllic peace. It was here a poet's childhood passed amid the crash of war, there an alchemist's old age flickering away amid cobwebs and gibberish. Something jocund and mischievous peeped out even in the cloister; gargoyles leered from the belfry, while ivy and holly grew about the cross. The Middle Ages were the true renaissance. Their Christianity was the theme, the occasion, the excuse for their art and jollity, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... peculiarity, as it was an invention of the author himself, who had taught it to the player. He seems to have considered it as no ordinary invention, and was so pleased with it that he has most painfully printed the speeches of the lawyer in this singular gibberish; and his reasons, as well as his discovery, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... made. And oh! had you heard, as together we walkt Thro' that beautiful forest, how sweetly he talkt; And how perfectly well he appeared, DOLL, to know All the life and adventures of JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU?— "'Twas there," said he—not that his words I can state— 'Twas a gibberish that Cupid alone could translate;— But "there," said he, (pointing where, small and remote, The dear Hermitage rose), "there his JULIE he wrote,— "Upon paper gilt-edged, without blot or erasure; "Then sauded it over with silver and azure, "And—oh, what ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Consequently his body became quite mahogany-coloured. When he was wounded he was put under an anaesthetic so that I could search for the bullet. As the anaesthetic began to take effect, Claude talked the usual unintelligible gibberish. Now, we happened to have a Turkish prisoner at the time, and in the midst of Claude's struggles and shouts in rushed an interpreter. He looked round, and promptly came over to Claude, uttering words which I suppose were calculated to soothe a wounded Turk; ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... broken English, the gibberish being mostly spoken with self-confidence and ease. Indeed, many of these people had some difficulty in speaking their native tongue. Bad English replete with literal translations from untranslatable Yiddish idioms had become their natural speech. The younger parents, however, more susceptible ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... ain't you, Heiny, so long as I give you a bit of sugar now and then?" he said to his decrepit old guardian in his German gibberish. ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... she herself would have liked to make, that she cross-questioned Sylvia afterwards as to its meaning; but Sylvia lied fluently, asserting that it was just some of Professor Kennedy's mathematical gibberish which had no meaning. ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the thin part of the nose; and they all twist kangaroo teeth and the bones of fishes more or less in their hair. Every thing small and diminutive they call "Pickaninnie," and any thing very good, "Merri jig." Their language is a queer, rattling, hard-sounding gibberish, incomprehensible to most people; they speak as fast as possible, laugh immoderately at trifles, and are excellent mimics. Their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... "brother beloved," SPIRITUALLY? In other words, might not Philemon consistently with the request of Paul, have reduced Onesimus to a chattel, AS A MAN, while he admitted him fraternally to his bosom, as a CHRISTIAN? Such gibberish in an apostolic epistle! Never. As if, however, to guard against such folly, the natural product of mist and moonshine, the apostle would have Onesimus raised above a servant to the dignity of a brother beloved, "BOTH IN THE FLESH AND IN THE LORD;"[C] ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... even the poems—passages indicating an anthropological science as intimate as it is unpretentiously expressed. To some good folk in our days, who think that nothing can be profound which is naturally and simply spoken, and who demand that a human philosopher shall speak gibberish and wear his boots on his brows, the fact may be strange, but it is a fact. And it may be added that even if chapter and verse could not thus be produced, a sufficient proof, the most sufficient possible, could be otherwise provided. Scott, by the confession of all competent judges, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... extraordinary man, Friar Bacon, reveals two of the ingredients, saltpetre and sulphur, and conceals the third in a sentence of mysterious gibberish, as if he dreaded the consequences of his own discovery, (Biog. Brit. vol. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... I cannot doubt it any longer; they are completely mad. (Aloud). Once more, I tell you, I understand nothing of all this gibberish; I will be master, and to cut short all kinds of arguments, either you shall both be married shortly, or, upon my word, you shall be nuns; that ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... gone," Aunt Mary told Lucinda, when they were left together once more. "She puts me beyond all patience. She chatters gibberish that I can't make out a word of for an hour at a time, and then, all of a sudden, she screams, 'Dinner's ready,' or something equally silly, in a voice like a carvin' knife. It's enough to drive a sane person ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... was only gibberish to the listeners, no answer was made, but all prepared to follow Ben, who was soon ready to change his ground. The bee-hunter took his way across the open ground to a point fully a hundred rods distant from his first position, where he found another stump ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... to teach them the Arabic-Koran, they are called guma, hard, or difficult as to religion. This is not wonderful, since the Koran is never translated, and a very extraordinary desire for knowledge would be required to sustain a man in committing to memory pages and chapters of, to him, unmeaning gibberish. One only of all the native chiefs, Monyumgo, has sent his children to Zanzibar to be taught to read and write the Koran; and he is said to possess an unusual admiration of such civilization as he has seen among the Arabs. To the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... For the gibberish 'an Anthony it was,' Theobald read 'an autumn 'twas,' and thus gave the lines true point and poetry. A third notable instance, somewhat more recondite, is found in 'Coriolanus' (II. i. 59-60) where Menenius asks the tribunes in the First Folio version 'what harm can your besom ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... ear, that sounded, indeed, like human language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing themselves with, by the hour together. At all events, if it involved any secret information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it was in a tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman, and did but increase ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... would throw them off their guard. They would never expect that two white people could so speedily turn themselves into niggers. Of course we must pretend to be dumb: though we can talk first-rate nigger gibberish in the berth, it won't pass current, I fear, among ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... his little handle, and tries to keep his feet. And Brown! he is magnificent! His long lash sends out a volley of rifle reports, down, up, ahead, back; his cracked voice roars out an unending stream of apparent gibberish. Back and forth along the line of the team he skips nimbly, the sweat streaming from his face. And the oxen plod along, unhasting, unexcited, their eyes dreamy, chewing the cud of yesterday's philosophic reflections. The situation conveys the general impression of a peevish little ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... scooped oranges . . . ! particularly while dangling the censers they keep shaking them in derision, and letting the ashes fly about their heads and faces, one against the other. In this equipage they neither sing hymns nor psalms nor masses, but mumble a certain gibberish as shrill and squeaking as a herd of pigs whipped on to market. The nonsense verses ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... unscholastic statesman that the governments of the world owed their peace, defence, and liberties; and from the illiterate and contemned mechanic (a name of disgrace) that they received the improvements of useful arts. Nevertheless, this artificial ignorance, and learned gibberish, prevailed mightily in these last ages, by the interest and artifice of those who found no easier way to that pitch of authority and dominion they have attained, than by amusing the men of business, and ignorant, with hard words, or employing the ingenious and idle ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... Crebillon; yet my style, which was full of Italianisms, often expressed the very reverse of what I meant to say. But generally my 'quid pro quos' only resulted in curious jokes which made my fortune; and the best of it is that my gibberish did me no harm on the score of wit: on the contrary, it procured ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... to spend the August vacation. I am thinking of Lake George, the Saguenay, Sea Girt, the White Mountains, when all at once I begin to yield drowsily to the influence of long conversations about nothing which take possession of my mind—mere gibberish, strings of words without sense. Thank Heaven, I am off! I am actually ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... said I, "is not gibberish; it was the name of the great wooden image at Ty Dewi, or Saint David's, in Pembrokeshire, to which thousands of pilgrims in the days of popery used to repair for the purpose of adoring it, and which at the time of the Reformation was sent up to London as a curiosity, where it eventually ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... for a moment to the newcomer and Adams, Barbara took Deston by the arm and led him away. "Just a little bit of that gibberish is a bountiful sufficiency, husband mine. So I think we'd better take Captain French's ...
— Subspace Survivors • E. E. Smith
... through the Midlands. Half-starved he was, pore chap. I never see such a gentlemanly sort of chap so hard pushed as he was; and at last out of charity like I took him on. And very glad I am, for he's turned out capital. He talks that Indian gibberish to the old Rajah, and the big beast follows him about like a lamb. Never have a bit of trouble with him now, only when he tries to shove one of the caravans over with that big head of his, just in play; and then Bah Klay—that's his show-name, and a very good one too—comes ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... bread was nearly gone, and I could earn nothing, for fear you would die while my face was turned, oh! I tried then! I smoothed his hair and whispered to him soft as a kitten, about the money—where it was, who had it? Alack! He would pick at my sleeve and whisper gibberish till my blood ran cold. At last, while Gretel lay whiter than snow, and you were raving on the bed, I screamed to him—it seemed as if he MUST hear me—'Raff, where is our money? Do you know aught of ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... woman? Would you drive me mad with your gibberish?" cried his lordship, getting up, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... At this Howell said with the most humble suavity, "Do I understand that the distinguished gentleman does not recognize what I have been reading?'' The preacher answered, "I don't understand any such gibberish; speak English.'' Thereupon Howell threw back his long black hair and launched forth into eloquent denunciation as follows: "Sir, is it possible that you come here to interpret to us the Holy Bible and do not recognize the language in which that blessed book was written? Sir, do you dare to call ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... dialect which no outsider can possibly understand; for, by common agreement, arbitrary names are applied to every object which the robbers at any time handle, and to every sort of underhand business which they transact. But this gibberish is not exactly an outcome of any moral obliquity; it is employed as a means of securing safety. The gipsy cant is the remnant of a pure and ancient language; we all occasionally use terms taken from this ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... It is in the old Foreign Office cipher and it looks like gibberish. I only know that the first few lines he transcribed gave dad ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... years too old for me, yet, by mental cuticular absorption, taking in and assimilating much that contributed to the formation of taste and character. My familiar use of language that sounded pedantic because I got it from books, my frequent references to characters I had known in print, were gibberish and vanity of vanities to my new associates. My very plays were unintelligible to girls who had never heard of William Wallace, and Robert Bruce, and Thaddeus of Warsaw, or read, on Sunday afternoons, of Tobias and the Angel, Judith and Holofernes, ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... dentist and doctor, claiming to come from an eastern city, while sitting at the table last evening, after much insane gibberish, fell back intoxicated upon the floor, and lay insensible for some time. He was finally, when the others had finished eating, dragged off to bed in a most inglorious condition, to suffer later for his dissipation. O, how my heart ached for ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... given your address, and the books you want, to the Arches; they will send them as soon as they can get them, but they do not seem quite familiar to [? with] their names. I have seen Gebor! Gebor aptly so denominated from Geborish, quasi Gibberish. But Gebor hath some lucid intervals. I remember darkly one beautiful simile veiled in uncouth phrases about the youngest daughter of the Ark. I shall have nothing to communicate, I fear, to the Anthology. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... are set apart for virtue. The ears of the people of England are distinguishing. They hear these men speak broad. Their tongue betrays them. Their language is in the patois of fraud, in the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy. The people of England must think so, when these praters affect to carry back the clergy to that primitive evangelic poverty which in the spirit ought always to exist in them, (and in us, too, however we may like it,) but in the thing must be varied, when the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... charter and the praters who appeal to it will be hanged in one rope. The good Talbot will shower commissions on his countrymen, and will cut the throats of the English. These verses, which were in no respect above the ordinary standard of street poetry, had for burden some gibberish which was said to have been used as a watchword by the insurgents of Ulster in 1641. The verses and the tune caught the fancy of the nation. From one end of England to the other all classes were constantly singing this idle rhyme. It was especially the delight of the English army. More than ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... applicant for charity announces himself with a bold bang on the door, followed by the pious ejaculation, 'Ave Maria!' The lame, or otherwise afflicted, are content with simply directing attention to their misfortunes, while the less 'favoured' attract public regard by humming a wild air, to which a gibberish libretto is attached, or by descanting upon social and political matters. The ill-paved condition of the Cuban streets, the inefficient supply of water, the bad lighting of the town at night, the total absence of anything like ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... the girl's feet and rubbing the girl's knees and legs like for rheumatism, which I knew the girl didn't have from the way I'd sized up the walk of her, and keeping time to the rubbing with a funny sort of gibberish chant. And I let loose right there and then. As Sarah knows, I never could a-bear women around the house—young, unmarried women, I mean. But it was no go! Old Paloma sided with the girl, and said if the girl went ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... is moving slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. Where the apex was today the second segment is tomorrow; what today can be understood only by the apex and to the rest of the triangle is an incomprehensible gibberish, forms tomorrow the true thought and feeling ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... dubitation whether it ever existed at all, and is not rather the waggish invention of certain audacious Scottishers, who have taken advantage of the insular ignorance and credulity of the British public to palm off upon it several highly fictitious kinds of unintelligible gibberish! ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... the facts underlying these. That we eat Christ's body in the Eucharist is a belief that, in a practical way, can be understood perfectly by anyone; but the philosophy that is involved in this belief would be to most men the merest gibberish. Yet it is no more unimportant that those who do understand this philosophy, should do so truly and transmit it faithfully, than it is unimportant that a physician should understand the action of alcohol, ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... did not understand the gibberish of squires and knights-errant, and did nothing but eat, hold their peace, and stare at their guests, who with great relish were gorging themselves with pieces as big as their fists. The course of flesh being over, the goatherds ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... spellbound, they saw presently the old woman trudge along after her, still muttering the unintelligible gibberish, easily translatable into wrath and fury, ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... tumble-down house on the next road, where the new family lived. The children were at play in the yard—seven in all, and none of them larger than Hope—but at sight of her they came forward hand in hand, jabbering such queer gibberish that Peace could ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown
... I want to know English, but I wish especially to speak French with an English accent." She had worked for nothing else. She had been, fortunately, rewarded for her perseverance; her little Anglo-Parisian gibberish was ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... Just to test the fellow, I bade him ask for my native place. The little boy gazed, smiled, babbled his gibberish, pointed. The man said he spoke of a fair mansion among green fields and hills, "a grand cavalier embonpoint,"—those were his very words,—at the door, with a tankard in one hand. Ah! my dear father, why could ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shown to seats that had been reserved for us. The rest of the congregation were negroes in every kind of dress and of every shade of color. The scene was very interesting, but the sermon of the preacher was little better than gibberish. He was a quaint old man, wearing goggles and speaking a dialect we could hardly understand. At the close of his sermon he narrated how the meeting-house had been built; that John had hauled the logs, Tom, Dick and Harry, naming them, had contributed their labor, but they were ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... your meaning," Mazarine said at last. "I never studied Greek. If a woman has a disease, there it is, and you can deal with it or not; but if she hasn't no disease, then it's chicanyery— chicanyery. Doctors talk a lot of gibberish these here days. What I want to know is, has my wife got a disease? I haven't seen any signs. Is it Bright's, or cancer, or the lungs, or the liver, or the kidneys, or the heart, or what's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a modification of Gray's; but, whereas he used both consonants and vowels to represent digits, and had to content himself with a syllable of gibberish to represent the date or whatever other number was required, I use only consonants, and fill in with vowels ad libitum, and thus can always manage to make a real word of whatever has to ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... action, which is commonly the best where there is the most need of it, surprise the audience, and cast a mist upon their understandings; not unlike the cunning of a juggler, who is always staring us in the face, and over-whelming us with gibberish, only that he may gain the opportunity of making the cleaner conveyance of his trick. But these false beauties of the stage are no more lasting than a rainbow; when the actor ceases to shine upon them, when he gilds them no longer with his reflection, they vanish ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... got a wife. I found that out from the porter, though the blessed old buffer can't speak anything but his French gibberish. 'Madame?' I said, bawling into his stupid old ear. 'Mossoo and Madame Hostin? comprenny?' and he says, 'Ya-ase,' and then bursts out laughing, and looks as proud as a hen that's just laid a ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... monotony, the island of Raza, off Rio Janeiro, was descried, and we slowly entered the harbor, passing a fort on our right hand, from which came a hail, in the Portuguese language, from a huge speaking-trumpet, and our officer of the deck answered back in gibberish, according to a well-understood custom of the place. Sugar-loaf Mountain, on the south of the entrance, is very remarkable and well named; is almost conical, with a slight lean. The man-of-war anchorage is about five miles inside the heads, directly in front of the city of Rio Janeiro. Words will ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... as surely as in matters of dress, and short stories are peculiarly subject to such changes. A few years ago dialect was all the cry, and a story was judged and valued according to the amount of unintelligible gibberish that it contained; before that romantic adventure was most in demand; and still earlier it was bald realism; at the time of writing (Spring of 1900) war stories hold first place in popular esteem. The reason for the present style is obvious, but in general these modes are difficult to explain and ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... querulous expression as the idea persisted and he clutched it anew. He looked at me, and at the river and the far shore. He tried to speak, but had no sounds with which to express the idea. The result was a gibberish that made me laugh. This angered him, and he grabbed me suddenly and threw me on my back. Of course we fought, and in the end I chased him up a tree, where he secured a long branch and poked me every time I tried to ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... of robin without beak or feathers. He could speak robin (which is a quite distinct language not to be mistaken for any other). To speak robin to a robin is like speaking French to a Frenchman. Dickon always spoke it to the robin himself, so the queer gibberish he used when he spoke to humans did not matter in the least. The robin thought he spoke this gibberish to them because they were not intelligent enough to understand feathered speech. His movements ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... who view the Indian at a distance and with no precise knowledge of any of his characteristics. In the estimation of such persons the Indian's vices greatly outweigh his virtues; his language is a gibberish, his methods of war cowardly, his ideas of ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... poetical monarch, I may have altered some of the words of the quotation; but the rhymes sauce and rose I aver to be true to the primitive copy. Even Protestant refugees, born of French parents, brought up amongst their co-religionists and countrymen, wrote a strange gibberish, often ungrammatical, always unidiomatic, of which traces may be found even in Basnage and Ancillon. A recent French theologian, the clever author of a Life of Spinosa, written in Germany and published in Paris with some success, has ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... correspondents. Figure to yourself a bald-headed personage, about forty years of age, near seven feet high, deaf as a post, stammering and making convulsive efforts to express a sentence of five words, which, after all, his gibberish made unintelligible. His dress was as eccentric as his person was singular, and his manners corresponded with both. He called himself Baron von Bulow, and I saw him afterwards, in the autumn of 1797, at Paris, with the same accoutrements and the same jargon, assuming an air of diplomatic ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... Preacher Allprayer said, when they turned him out o' meeting for gitting drunk and swearing—the dear good man!—but I do wish, for gracious sake, I could only jest change places with 'em—ef jest for five minutes—and I reckon as how they'd be glad to quit their gibberish, and talk like Christian folks, once in thar sneaking lives! Thar, they're done now, I do hope to all marcy's sake! and I reckons as how we'll soon have ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... That old woman can follow. I don't want to hear her gibberish. We've lost the game—there 's no reckoning the luck. If there's a chance, it's this way. It smells a trick. He and she—by all the devils! It has been done in my family—might have been done again. Tell the men on the plain they can drive home. There's a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... I nearly sang myself into a consumption. How I used to dance! And take my part in a farce, or hold up my end in the barber shops! Who could hold a candle to me except, of course, the one and only Apelles?" He then put his hand to his mouth and hissed out some foul gibberish or other, and said afterwards that it was Greek. Trimalchio himself then favored us with an impersonation of a man blowing a trumpet, and when he had finished, he looked around for his minion, whom he called Croesus, a blear-eyed slave whose teeth were very disagreeably ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... polite world that she's a political nonentity; to have the fact gracefully mourned over, or wittily laughed at, in classic words and cultured voice by one's superiors in knowledge, wisdom and power; but to hear the rights of woman scorned in foreign tongue and native gibberish by everything in manhood's form, is enough to fire the souls of those who think and feel, and rouse ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... it up as he found it, and looked full at Antony, who exclaimed in much agitation, "To keep out the dust. Only to keep out the dust. It is all gibberish—from my old writing-books." ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Interrogate a Guinea negro, for him beauty is a black oily skin, deep-set eyes, a flat nose. Interrogate the devil; he will tell you that beauty is a pair of horns, four claws and a tail. Consult, lastly, the philosophers, they will answer you with gibberish: they have to have something conforming to the arch-type of beauty in essence, to ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... but young in figure—muttered something in a gibberish new to me, and made as if excusing himself. It gave me an ugly start to see that his eyes were yellow too, with long slits for pupils; but I saw too that he was afraid of me, and being in a towering rage myself, I out ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... wildly, as if he wanted her to bend over him, to hear what he might struggle to say. She immediately obeyed the sign. He fixed his eyes upon her, made efforts to articulate, which resulted only in a thick, broken gibberish. She could only catch one or two indistinct words, from which it seemed that he wished to tell her where she would find the will; but the precise phrase whereby he wished to indicate the deposit was pronounced in such an imperfect manner that she could not make it out. Strangely ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... within an uncommonly loud noise, he entered, as was his right and office. There stood the occupant,[59] holding in his hands one of the Chapel Bibles, while before him on the table were placed the images, to which he appeared to be reading, but in reality was vociferating all kinds of senseless gibberish. "What is the meaning of this noise?" inquired the tutor in great anger. "Propagating the Gospel among the Indians, Sir," replied the ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... very different in complexion from those which the critics seemed to have expected, that they were taken aback and declared to the public almost with one accord that the writer's eccentricities had developed into mannerisms, that his theories of life were political manifestoes, that his dialects were gibberish, and his defiance of the orthodox canons of autobiography scarcely less than an outrage upon ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... Brace, eager to share Miss Keene's sentiments; "and he's so good to those outlandish niggers in the crew. I don't see how the captain could get on with the crew without him; he's the only one who can talk their gibberish and keep them quiet. I've seen him myself quietly drop down among them when they were wrangling. In my opinion," continued the young fellow, lowering his voice somewhat ostentatiously, "you'll find out when we get to port that ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... he goes on with overwhelming enthusiasm.] Well, conjurers are just the same. It takes some time to prepare an impromptu. A man like that walks about the woods and fields doing all his tricks beforehand, and talking all sorts of gibberish because he thinks he is alone. One evening this man found he was not alone. He found a very beautiful child was ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... principle of limitation is found "amongst the Pandects of the Benares." Did my editor believe that I uttered these words, and that the House of Commons listened patiently to them? If he did, what must be thought of his understanding? If he did not, was it the part of an honest man to publish such gibberish as mine? The most charitable supposition, which I therefore gladly adopt, is that Mr Vizetelly saw nothing absurd in the expression which he has attributed to me. The Benares he probably supposes ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... D'Arblay had carried a bad style to France. She brought back a style which we are really at a loss to describe. It is a sort of broken Johnsonese, a barbarous patois, bearing the same relation to the language of Rasselas, which the gibberish of the negroes of Jamaica bears to the English of the House of Lords. Sometimes it reminds us of the finest, that is to say, the vilest parts, of Mr. Gait's novels; sometimes of the perorations of Exeter Hall; ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the gibberish to mind?" This was asked earnestly, and made Dr. Nash feel he was on ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... this time I had guessed 'twas Master Ratsey, and recognized his voice. 'I would have let thee hear soon enough that 'twas I, if I had known I was so near thy lair; but 'tis more than a man's life is worth to creep down moleholes in the dark, and on a night like this. And why I could not get out the gibberish about the Bonaventure sooner, was because I matched my shin to break a stone, and lost the wager and my breath together. And when my wind returned 'tis very like that I was trapped into an oath, which is sad enough for me, who am sexton, and so to say in small orders of the ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... thought, particularly when she had to exert herself in any way, either to move, to count money, or to choose a turning. "To know the truth—to accept without bitterness"—those, perhaps, were the most articulate of her utterances, for no one could have made head or tail of the queer gibberish murmured in front of the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford, save that the name of Ralph occurred frequently in very strange connections, as if, having spoken it, she wished, superstitiously, to cancel it by adding some other word that ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... pointing to the rug. "You went to sleep there after the long walk, and talked in your sleep about 'Bob' and 'All right, old boy,' and ever so much gibberish. I didn't think about it then, but when I heard that Bob was up there I thought may be he knew something about it, and last night I wrote and asked him, and that's the answer, and now it is all right, and you are the best boy that ever ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... health from the fear to lose it; to feel an interest in rheumatism, an awe of bronchitis; to tell anecdotes, and to wear flannel. To you in strict confidence I disclose the truth: I am no longer twenty-five. You laugh; this is civilized talk: does it not refresh you after the gibberish you must have chattered in ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... slim, narrow-chested man, with a pointed beard and big ears—came and held a mirror to my mouth, and opened one of my veins, and talked a great deal of gibberish, whilst he made countless covert sheep's eyes at the pretty chambermaid, who had taken advantage of his arrival to overhaul my knapsack and help herself from my purse. I distinctly heard the arrangements ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... reader has been receiving information second-hand about their past and future, when a scratching, scraping, boring noise on the outside of their bark roof temporarily disturbed their slumbers. Dol called out noisily, and, as was the way of that youngster on sundry occasions, talked some gibberish in his ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... revolution possessed as much liberty as they could lay hands on between the Tower of London, into which they put orators, and the pillory, into which they put writers. Anne spoke a little Danish in her private chats with her husband, and a little French in her private chats with Bolingbroke. Wretched gibberish; but the height of English fashion, especially at court, was to talk French. There was never a bon mot but in French. Anne paid a deal of attention to her coins, especially to copper coins, which are the low and popular ones; she wanted to cut a great figure on ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... on with us because I one day spit at her and called her a name she did not like. I can talk Hindostanee as well as English, I suppose you can't," and Master Norman uttered some words which sounded in Fanny's ears very much like gibberish. ...
— Norman Vallery - How to Overcome Evil with Good • W.H.G. Kingston
... year. To support his new character, he practised some religious mummeries; he was seen worshipping the rising and setting sun. He made a prayer-book with rude drawings of the sun, moon, and stars, to which he added some gibberish prose and verse, written in his invented character, muttering or chanting it, as the humour took him. His custom of eating raw flesh seemed to assist his deception more than the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Hayston, who perfectly knew and thoroughly despised the character of this man, "none of your cogging gibberish; tell me truly, are you at liberty ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... indecent or ridiculous act which he had done or approved was condemned; but what was most grossly absurd in his theories and practices was softened down, or at least not obtruded on the public; whatever could be made to appear specious was set in the fairest light; his gibberish was translated into English; meanings which he would have been quite unable to comprehend were put on his phrases; and his system, so much improved that he would not have known it again, was defended by numerous citations from Pagan philosophers and Christian ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
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