Mumbo-Jumbo Sure Ain't Gibberish

In the fourth year of Secondary School, Form 4b of Alsop Comp for Boys Only were due a lesson in Godknowswhat. A couple of pals and I arrived early, dunno know why, but for some reason I boldly chalked,

..on the squeaky owl blackboard. When the bell went off, we bundled out of the room to queue up with the rest of our mates in the corridor and wait for the Master to show. I don’t remember who he was, fifty-odd years hence, but what has stuck in my mind all this time was that he taught without erasing my words. Whatever he was supposed to be on about, what I’d written on the board was the real subject. Needless to say, I struggled not to laugh and give myself away as the author, and I wasn’t alone, it being one of the few occasions in the five years we were together I earned the title of Class Wag – quite a honour... (another time involved a pair of sliding blackboards with a sausage wedged between). All I can say about the lesson was that the Master ended up teaching - in no uncertain terms - that Mumbo-Jumbo Definitely Was Not Gibberish, even if none of us at the time could tell quite how he had pulled this off, and he musta been blissfully unaware, or maybe superaware as teaching folk sometimes slyly are.

As to the meaning, I wouldn’t mind having a stab at it now, should the Reader permit...

Note that the Leftovers - for whom I was a prominent left back - had the most extreme knockabout games that have ever taken place in or out of Liverpool, far from the watchful gaze of sadistic sport’n’science Masters. Sorry, am I getting sidetracked down the jigger behind Memory’s Cul-de-sac? A-hem! Or, “A-homme!”, as some might cough when a Master entered stage right...

You see, to us school was not a place to learn very much beyond when to duck or dive, if to lie and how not to tell the truth. Oh, you might – if you paid extreme attention – have stuffed some trigonometry or Shakespeare up your sleeve. You may have been versed in the causes of the First World War and the effects of light & humidity on the behaviour of woodlice; you might have parroted a bit of French or Spanish; and if you were exceptionally bright, you could also have shone in the revelation that electricity came in both AC and DC, long before Australia had music that didn’t come in only Rock’n’Rolf. Apart from all that, just the lads who were good at sports excelled in anything that seemed to matter. For sports read football, soccer and togger.

So let us examine this Mumbo-Jumbo - incidentally the title of a surrealist novel by Ishmael Reed, first published in 1972 (2 years after the events related here, see below for link). The term itself suggests mumbled, jumbled-up utterance; not entirely nonsensical, but neither penetrable by much analysis. It is often deployed against pointlessly technical jargon or the bogus dogma of a dubious cult. Hence I think Winston Churchill used it in an early memoir to refer to the creed of the established church. Or maybe that was “rigmarole” – so what? The same difference will apply. Of course, to the initiated (if not the inebriated), Mumbo-Jumbo is not gibberish at all; but to those not in on the lark, this fact might still need pointing out.

The so-called lower primates gibber incorrigibly, and though the sounds thus produced probably make perfect sense to themselves and each other, to most of us Gibberish appears a poor approximation of language as we know it. Human Gibberish is also somewhat imbecilic, and may be punctuated with such delicacies as spittle and drool. Gibbering, then, is not Mumbo-Jumbo in the sense that whatever it expresses, there is little or no meaningful exchange of information.

So, what the hell you may say, chalk sure ain’t cheese, either. But I would say the distinction to a spotty fourteen year old was in itself a revelation on a par with Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, which I was about to attempt reading... (and to give up on at page 3). The first of many trite remarks, crass impertinences and half-witticisms. Read on, MacDuff... 

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Click here for Ishmael Reed's Mumbo-Jumbo

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shallow truths

 

fe’ral judge in document

case has ruled themselves a joint

stick it up your jumper ban

that’s how it works

 

Mr President your right

hand should never know what’s left

wave & smile we’re passing thru

Washington State

 

all the way to Florida

keep a beedy eye out for

somewhere on this road now turn

round one more shot

 

gee it’s hot I mean to say

she but pronouns tend to lie

down just when you need their Please

Please me or Help

 

oh another thing I tried

opening the window but

quite a lot of paperwork

blew the hell out

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In a note from our spinsters,

“Pardon me, Nuestros Amigos Naughtyamericarnos, but God, Satan & that big feller with the axe will punish you for voting Shyster & Co. back in. (Also, your membership of The Owl Civilisation Mob royally flushed.)”

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Tolpuddle revisited

 

for a thousand years or so

everything was black & white

rich folks ran the bloody show

god & their right

 

then the colour bar was raised

Winston Churchill voted out

slowly things began to change

still there was doubt

 

agriculture industry’d

pulled the rug from under us

common land which had been free

flogged to the boss

 

common folk with many skills

driven from ancestral homes

put to work in gaslit mills

giants to gnomes

 

little better off than slaves

few retained their heritage

time we started making waves

under the bridge

(verses Excerpted from the forthcoming chapbook, "Dismal Stories")

No Bull Obliged!