The other day, the website Futility Closet posted a reproduction of a document from the National Archives.
Greg Ross, proprietor of the site, observed, “This is the first known usage of gobbledygook to refer to obscure jargon.” He was almost certainly correct. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word as “Official, professional, or pretentious verbiage or jargon.” It offers as first citation a definition published the month after the memo, in an April 1944 edition of the journal American Notes and Queries: “Gobbledygook talk: Maury Maverick’s name for the long high-sounding words of Washington’s red-tape language.” Now that the original memo is available, I hope the OED updates its entry.
Note that Maverick’s initial use was as an adjective or at least a modifying word, but by the next year, it had settled into the noun we’re familiar with, as in this 1947 quote from Time: “The Veterans Administration translated its bureaucratic gobbledygook.”
Who was Maury Maverick? Was he even a real person, with that dashing alliterative name and fakey title — Chairman and General Manager of the Smaller War Plants Corporation? The answer is one of several fascinating things about this tale. Maury Maverick definitely existed. He was a World War I veteran from Texas who served in Congress as a Democrat from 1935 through 1938. Lyndon Johnson was an aide in his first campaign, and Johnson’s biographer Robert Caro referred to Maverick as “the fiery radical whose utopian schemes and fierce defense of Communist organizers in Texas had already caused an opponent to charge him with a desire to ‘supplant the American flag with the Red flag of Russia.’” Maverick was mayor of San Antonio from 1939 till 1941, did indeed chair the Smaller War Plants Corporation during World War II, and died in 1954. His son, Maury Maverick Jr., followed him into the Texas firebrand line. He passed away in 2003, having just published a newspaper column protesting the Iraq War.
As far as word coinage is concerned, Maury Sr. wasn’t even the best in his family. His grandfather, Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803-1870), was a cattleman and ... well, you might be able to guess the rest. The OED quotes an 1869 article saying that Samuel Maverick
owned such immense herds that many of his animals unavoidably escaped his rouanne in the spring, were taken up by his neighbors, branded and called “mavericks.” The term eventually spread over the whole State, and is in use now, not only to denote a waif thus acquired, but any young animal. No great drove can sweep through this mighty unfenced State without drawing a wake of these"‘mavericks.”
The dictionary’s first citation of the word used to denote “an unorthodox or independent-minded person; a person who refuses to conform to the views of a particular group or party” dates from 1880. Today, maverick is used about eight times more frequently than gobbledygook. According to Wikipedia, it is the name of five different aircraft, an Apple operating system, the venerable television western starring James Garner, a country band, brands of cigarettes and jeans, and 21 operating and defunct sports teams, including the Dallas Mavericks, Minor League Baseball’s Mid-High Desert Mavericks, and the Mercy College Mavericks.
Going back to gobbledygook, something odd happened after Maury Maverick wrote his memo in 1944. The word, and his cause, went sort of viral. Perhaps Maverick knew a United Press reporter and was shooting the breeze over drinks one night, but however it happened, just a week later, on March 31, a short UP article basically reproducing the memo appeared in newspapers around the country. That led to more articles, including the Notes and Queries one cited by the OED, and, on April 14, a Washington Post editorial that began “We wish that Mr. Maury Maverick would send us a report on how his one-man campaign against ‘Gobbledygook language’ is progressing.”
Maverick’s public-relations acumen aside, his crusade struck a nerve. It was one of a number of contemporaneous arguments for — in the words of the title of Sir Ernest Gowers’s 1948 book — Plain Words. There was also Plain English Handbook, by J. Martyn Walsh and Anna Kathleen Walsh (1936); The Reader Over Your Shoulder, by Robert Graves and Allan Hodge (1943); The Art of Plain Talk, by Rudolf Flesch (1946); and Geoffrey Pullum’s favorite, George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” (A cynic would say these critics’ efforts were for naught, as their heirs are to this day railing against finalize.)
Less than two months after his memo, The New York Times Magazine asked Maverick to write a longer piece about gobbledygook. In it, he said that after the memo got famous,
People asked me how I got the word. I do not know. It must have come in a vision. Perhaps I was thinking of the old bearded turkey gobbler back in Texas who was always gobbledygobbling and strutting with ridiculous pomposity. At the end of his gobble there was a sort of gook.
Maverick may have been disingenuous, or the Times may have been adhering to its policy of only publishing news that is fit to print. But in any case, Maverick’s etymology was, at best, incomplete, as gobbledygook had a long-established meaning at the time. According to Movers and Shakers: A Chronology of Words That Shaped Our Age, by John Ayto, the word is “a variation on earlier US slang gobbledygook, which originally denoted a prostitute specializing in fellatio.”
Try to keep that out of your mind the next time a colleague goes on about “optimization of best practices going forward.”