Word: mumbo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...were silly like us," Auden wrote of Irish Poet William Butler Yeats, but the truth is that Yeats was sillier, more willing to appear foolish and embrace mumbo jumbo in service to his art. Auden's way was very different, circumspect; his poetry achieved greatness but never reached out for Yeatsian grandeur. He wrote...
...appeared on the cover of Ms. with Editor Gloria Steinem's endorsement that "she crosses the sex/race barrier to make every reader understand the political and intimate truths of growing up black and female in America." Some blacks have also joined the acclaim. Novelist Ishmael Reed (Mumbo-Jumbo, Free-Lance Pallbearers), for example, says that Wallace has brought "cool clarity to a subject about which so much frenetic and feverish nonsense has been written...
...expert at deciphering gobbledygook might lend a hand to C. Milton Allen, senior vice president of Houston's Panhandle Eastern Pipe Line Co. For the past two months, he and 15 aides have been waging a bleary-eyed battle to make sense out of not just that mumbo-jumbo masterpiece but plenty of others like it. The language is from the pricing regulations drawn up by the Council on Wage and Price Stability (COWPS) to enforce Jimmy Carter's Stage II guidelines. The rules were supposed to put some muscle into the White House's campaign against...
...breed bitter resentment. "Lawyers have become secular priests," says Fred Button, a White House aide in the Kennedy Administration and now a successful Washington, D.C., attorney. They are, agrees Berkeley Law Dean Sanford Kadish, masters of "a mysterious art form to which the layman is not privy, with mumbo jumbo going on." The heart of the art, of course, is the impenetrable language that lawyers use, sometimes at great length (a direct outgrowth of the English practice of paying lawyers by the word for their briefs, which were, as a result, rarely brief...
Still, the mumbo jumbo can intimidate and irritate the layman. Further resentment stems from the ability of excellent lawyers to muddle and obfuscate. Says Button: "Lawyers are paid to complicate, to keep a dispute alive, to make everything technical." The Washington, D.C., firm of Covington & Burling, for example, once delayed for twelve years a Food and Brug Administration ruling on the labeling of peanut butter jars. Said one Covington lawyer: "Certainly, there's something suspicious about a 24,000-page hearing transcript and close to 75,000 pages of documents on a case involving peanut butter." As Humorist Art Buchwald...