"Gibberish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the most part they were very ragged, and tanned exceedingly wherever the flesh took a peep through their outworn plaids. They ran about the streets in groups, looking in shop windows like children and talking their outlandish gibberish; then presently their Highland pride would assert itself at the smile of some chance passer and would send them swinging proudly off as though they had better ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... to prevent the loss of their brains, which would otherwise break out from their uneasy confinement. It affords likewise a pleasant scene of laughter, to listen to these divines in their hotly managed disputations; to see how proud they are of talking such hard gibberish, and stammering out such blundering distinctions, as the auditors perhaps may sometimes gape at, but seldom apprehend: and they take such a liberty in their speaking of Latin, that they scorn to stick at the exactness of syntax or concord; pretending it is below the majesty of a ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... of 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
... 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 hundred-pound weight ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he find him a guest at the board of a Jesuit priest, visiting the schools of the Mission where this young Jezebel of a singer teaches the children to chant in unknown tongues? Didn't he find him living with a wrinkled Indian witch who called him 'Padrone'—and speaking her gibberish? Didn't he find him, who left here a man mortified in flesh and spirit and pale with striving with sinners, fat and rosy from native wines and fleshpots, and even vain and gaudy in colored apparel? And last of all, didn't Brother ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... 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
... 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
... very carefully and fling ashore. There were about thirty men, and you would have thought from the noise and talking that it was a great fire in the country, with no head to the engine companies and every man giving orders. They were good-natured as possible, but sometimes their gibberish sounds as if they were scolding. The boys, with their pantaloons, or what answer for sich, rolled up to their knees, were hauling at the rope or picking up the crabs and making them catch hold of each other till ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... 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 ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... out 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 mountains in the spring. ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... 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 of Babel. ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... veer; 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 ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... outlandish gibberish," returned his lordship. "Go and fetch me some whisky. This stuff is too cold to go to ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... took," 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 ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... 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 ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... 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 ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the top of his harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved and ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... arm. The serf came for the flowers, which he had orders to carry to the apartment of his young master. Having placed five or six in his basket, he turned to Gilbert and gave him to understand, in his Teutonic gibberish mingled with French, that he had something important to communicate to him. Gilbert answered in a tone of ill-humor, that he had not time to listen to him. Ivan shook his head with a pensive air, and left. Gilbert immediately seated himself at the table, and upon the first ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... That 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
... necessarily soon exerted a profound influence upon education. The language of the monks and schoolmen seemed little better than gibberish to scholars fresh from Vergil and Cicero, and the study of Latin was placed upon a new foundation. Moreover, Latin itself ceased to afford the sole key to knowledge. The student who sought the highest ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... be 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 Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... The Hindoos have their sacred Sanscrit, and so of the rest. The benumbed and frozen mind of the Esquimaux, amidst the fat seals, blubber, and seas of oil in which it revels and swims, when anticipating the joys of the polar heaven, makes the tongue involuntarily speak in genuine Esquimauxan gibberish. It is, however, not surprising that the language in which a people first receives the rudiments of its religion should be greatly venerated and acquire a peculiar sacredness. The Shereef asked me to show him the passage where Mahomet was spoken of under the title of Parakleit; ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... animals who fill the Zoo with their strange noises, early man liked to jabber. That is to say, he endlessly repeated the same unintelligible gibberish because it pleased him to hear the sound of his voice. In due time he learned that he could use this guttural noise to warn his fellow beings whenever danger threatened and he gave certain little shrieks ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... 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 reverence,' says I, 'we are broken people; ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... 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 street. ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... was that he had come back as soft-headed as he went, and try as we might, we couldn't get anything reasonable out of him. He talked a lot of gibberish about keelhauling and walking the plank and crimson murders—things which a decent sailor should know nothing about, so that it seemed to me that for all his manners captain had been more of a pirate than a gentleman mariner. But to draw sense out of that boy was as hard as picking ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... said the old 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 subject ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... such mingle-mangle talk," ordered Mr. Meredith, fretfully. "Is 't not enough to have French gibberish ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... even as he uttered it, he knew it could not be understood. A thousand years of rapid degeneration had long wiped all traces of English speech from the brute-men, who now, at most, chattered some bestial gibberish. Yet the warning echoed loudly through Madison ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... passage sailed, Speaking some unknown language strange and sweet Of 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 frightening ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... tub, which will roll along on the top of the water, instead of cutting through 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
... 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 ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... he was abreast 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
... 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 to ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... 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, ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... 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, ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... 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 ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... me a new 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 time I had known him, he had been playing a part, and that only ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... being a horse-sorcerer, an art he learned among the gypsies, with whose secrets he claimed acquaintance. He whispered some unknown gibberish into their ears, and professed ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... you'd have 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 up, like some ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... 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
... 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 you were ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... 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 ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... shelter, as if it claimed all those homeless people for its lawful prey, while we, caring little for the displeasure of the elements, sat comfortably talking. There was now an attempt to open the door, succeeded by a voice uttering some strange, unintelligible gibberish which my companions mistook for Greek and I suspected to be thieves' Latin. However, the showman stepped forward and gave admittance to a figure which made me imagine either that our wagon had rolled back two ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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
... from that which aquosity bears to 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
... lot of hell-cats was a-pulling at his ears, and 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 on ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... of English, French, and German without success, from 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
... message and studied it. Then he read it again, uncertainly. He was sure of his knowledge of English, but the note was senseless gibberish. Again he read ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... 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 ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... 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 of Brompton where I lodged and ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... while, le Bourdon continued his incantations aloud; walking toward his canoe, waving his hand, and uttering a great deal of gibberish as he slowly proceeded. In passing the tree, our hero, though he did not turn his head, was sensible that he was followed by the chiefs, a movement against which he did not dare to remonstrate, though it sadly disappointed him. Neither hastening nor retarding his steps, however, in consequence ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... jumped along to the tune of a jig he was whistling, now and then changing the whistle into a song to the same tune, with very odd words indeed, and a burden of gibberish ending with "riddle-diddle-dow," Furlong wondered what a milliner could have to do in such an establishment, and his wonder was not lessened when his guide added, "The milliner is a queer chap, and maybe he'll tell ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... 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
... 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
... and destroy the oligarchical faction. A few months 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
... somewhat responsible for the crime, having been one of those who had directed the massacre. I had made an orphan! I must take her part. One of the prisoners of the band had said to me (I understand a little of the gibberish of these people) that if I left the little one to these women they would kill her because she was the daughter of a Touareg, whom the chief had preferred to them, and that they hated the petted, spoiled child, whom he had given ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... 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, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... 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 to render him exceedingly uneasy. The ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... services is English in all the vigour and suppleness of early youth. To the great Latin writers, to Terence and Lucretius, to Cicero and Caesar, to Tacitus and Quintilian, the noblest compositions of Ambrose and Gregory would have seemed to be, not merely bad writing, but senseless gibberish, [493] The diction of our Book of Common Prayer, on the other hand, has directly or indirectly contributed to form the diction of almost every great English writer, and has extorted the admiration of the most accomplished infidels and of the most accomplished nonconformists, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... brother, what I have told you; and that does not effect many cures. All the excellency of their art consists in pompous gibberish, in a specious babbling, which gives you words instead of reasons, ...
— The Imaginary Invalid - Le Malade Imaginaire • Moliere
... 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 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
... practitioner who is so awed by them that he withdraws from them and remains humbly reticent in a state of enomatophobia; or, if he be more tough-minded, he may be amused by, or contemptuous of, what he refers to as "psychiatric jargon" or "pseudoscientific gibberish." There is, furthermore, a dearth of concise, authoritative, well-written text-books on psychiatry, and the general medical journals rarely print psychiatric papers designed to interest the average practitioner. The most widely diffused ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... at once snobs and poets. MacIan might possibly be a gentleman, they felt; the editor manifestly was not. And the editor's fine rational republican appeals to his respect for law, and his ardour to be tried by his fellow citizens, seemed to the police quite as much gibberish as Evan's mysticism could have done. The police were not used to hearing principles, even the principles of their ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... 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 is a very different ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... 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 ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... 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
... right," he commanded, and there followed a string of words that would have been mere gibberish to Bob had he not held the key to their meaning. He searched frantically in his pockets for a pencil, and scribbled the words down as the man spoke them. When he had finished, the leader of the gang shut down the generator, and turned ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... click, then a hum, as the recorder was jacked into his headset circuit. Immediately, a familiar voice began a slow dissertation on power leads from the dome, speeded up in the space of a second or two to a high-pitched alien gibberish, then to a faint scream. He began squirming around the turbine tanks, got past the first brace, and turned to attach it again. Of course it wasn't necessary, but—"PLAY IT SAFE" was embroidered on his ...
— Tight Squeeze • Dean Charles Ing
... of Bert's visit, was one called "Crazy Colin," a 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 ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... 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, ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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 he's stopped the ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... "Hurl 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 neighbourhood, ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... 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 he destroyed him he ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... 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 ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... off, Master Gaffin, and your money too," exclaimed Susan, indignantly, putting her hands behind her back. "Do you fancy we don't know you with all your pretended French airs and gibberish. Let me advise you not to show your face ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... not that delightful? In the same way the doctrines of the sages are mere gibberish to women and children who cannot understand them. Now, my sermons are not written for the learned: I address myself to farmers and tradesmen, who, hard pressed by their daily business, have no time for study, with the wish to make known to them the teachings of the sages; and, ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... story is designed as a satire on pedantry, and is as old in Italy as Straparola (sixteenth century). In passionate Sicily a wife disgusted with her husband's pedantry sets the house on fire, and informs her husband of the fact in this unintelligible gibberish; he, not understanding his own lingo, falls a victim to the flames, and she marries the servant who had taken ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... literature just 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 ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... fellows what be called 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
... Shepherd makes 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 an excuse ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... displeasure, 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
... 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 ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... youth pointed back to the garden, and, laughing hideously, uttered some words in gibberish which were quite unintelligible. ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... much time 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
... quotation (of which he probably did not understand a word), but added that had he gone a little farther, and completed the passage, he would have seen that the context completely altered the sense. He would prove it to the House, he said, and forthwith rolled forth a grand string of majestic gibberish so well imitated that the whole assembly cried, 'Hear, hear!' Lord Belgrave rose again, and frankly admitted that the passage had the meaning ascribed to it by the honourable gentleman, and that he had overlooked it at the moment. At the end of the evening, Fox, who prided himself ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... 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 ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... was not until we got him to test Tristan's eery buoyancy with his own hands that we were able to make him understand the real nature of our problem. And after that, his comments remained largely gibberish for some time. However, he was even quicker than we were to see the need for secrecy—he had vivid visions of the political capital which opposing newspapers would make of any such occurrence at his party—and so we arranged a plan. According to which ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... 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
... as he put on his great coat, "it is a curious fact that, with all his incredulity, he is exceedingly superstitious. You can hardly believe how troubled he is about some gibberish of that old hag that sets charms for lame horses, etc. I'm not at all sure but that she set charms in the other way ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... practices rejected or abandoned by the 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 ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... Elliston's school. An omission for which he cursed himself roundly upon an evening, early in February when an Indian, gaunt and wide-eyed from the strain of a forced snow-trail, staggered from the black shadow of the bush into the glare of the blazing night-fires, and in a frenzied gibberish of jargon proclaimed that Bob MacNair had returned to the Northland. And not only that he had returned, but had visited Lac du Mort in company with a man of ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... 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 which is ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... 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 ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... chance away. He come after me and followed me up all 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 ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... 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 were striving to realise some half-seen horror. She lifted her hand ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... cautioned him to sit quiet in the place where he 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 ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... askance at the distinctions, and honours, and revenues, which, taken from no 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 ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... 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
... 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 cannot be a ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... the book aside, 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 about this ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... curious enough. For Parsons was kneeling by the side of the dying man, listening earnestly to the confession which the man sobbed out in his gibberish, between the spasms of his wounded chest. Now and then Parsons shook his head; and when Eustace returned with the holy wafer, and the oil for extreme unction, he asked him, in a low ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... not mathematical, and to hell with the gibberish you talk. I tell you and I tell you again that when it comes to lighting a fire, I'm there, but to light it again when it's gone out, I'm no good. I can't speak ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... race. Where the Puritanism has gone out of the people in spots, there's the rankest growth of all sorts of crazy heresies, and the old scriptural nomenclature has given place to something compounded of the fancifulness of story-paper romance and the gibberish of spiritualism. They make up their names, sometimes, and call a child by what sounds pretty to them. I wonder how the captain picked ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... that?" 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 ...
— A Man of Business • Honore de Balzac
... 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, "Show off ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... head, cocked-hat fashion, as he was often obliged to do in our fishing-excursions to the northern lakes. It now occurred to me, however, that I had incautiously left the brandy- flask in his charge, and when he came up with me I gathered from his fishy eye, and the thick dribblings of his macaronic gibberish,—which was compounded of sundry Indian dialects and French-Canadian patois, coarsely ground up with bits of broken English,—that the modern Circe, who changes men into beasts, had wrought her spells upon him; a circumstance at which I was terribly annoyed, as foreboding ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... British port of the East, and here he decided to land. No sooner had the travelers touched the dock, than they were surrounded by a yelling, jostling crowd of Chinese coolies, all shouting in an outlandish gibberish for the privilege of carrying the Barbarians' baggage. A group gathered round Mackay, and in their eagerness began hammering each other with bamboo poles. He was well-nigh bewildered, when above the din sounded the welcome music of ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... 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
... him, the Minister has not been very judicious in his selection of private 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 ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... thing," 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 me ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... blood-sucker who is every day winning the king's money! You have fallen into the wrong box, for I neither like nor wish to have anything to do with such fellows.' Pimentello got warm. 'Go about your business,' said Sully, giving him a shove; 'your infernal gibberish will not alter my ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... smile, and 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 ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... 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 rest—still gibberish. He dropped also the 'l'—still gibberish. Then, in turn, ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... wrong line, or the misplacement of a line, one or other—which takes place in all the editions I have examined—Scott has, sad to say, got hold of the wrong words; he has written down the demon of the demons of the moon. Instead of the gibberish above, it should have been Malcha betarsisim hed beruah schenhakim. In p. 253, we have the magic square of the moon, with eighty-one numbers, and the symbol for the Intelligence, which Scott likens to a flying {50} serpent ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... fire in the darkness: and when he opens the door again he is in another temple, out of which he climbs into another world, leagues and leagues away. And when he asks the meaning of the vision, they talk gibberish and say, "It is ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... here at Farnham[1] school. Last year, a lad hence by his 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 whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts; Nor wonder, if ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift |
