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OnWords: Arble-garble

As a student of online political writing, I’ve sometimes run across the term “arble-garble.”

“Arble-garble” shows a writer’s exasperation at the sheer stupidity of opposing rhetoric and is often used at the end of a quote, something like “Senator Belfry’s speech called for the immediate abolition of public education for women in favor of training in shopping and housekeeping and arble-garble-garble . . . .”

“Arble-garble” reminds me of a passage from George Orwell’s appendix to his dystopian novel 1984, in which he describes the spouting of political orthodoxy as “DUCKSPEAK.” According to Orwell, duckspeak is when speech would “issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.”

Having heard plenty of political speech from both the left and right, and having spouted some of it myself, it seems to me that we’re close to achieving Orwell’s terrifying vision: political language so often repeated and so well rehearsed that communicating it requires no thought whatsoever.

“Arble-garble” expresses not merely frustration with what the opposition has to say but an admission that the reader has probably seen all this before, and it’s just as thoughtless, incoherent, and absurd as ever.

Lael Ewy is a co-founder and editor of EastWesterly Review, a journal of literary satire at www.postmodernvillage.com, and a writer whose work has appeared in such venues as Denver Quarterly and New Orleans Review and has been anthologized in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh.