Contextualizebeta

bafflegab

noun
/ˈbæfəlɡæb/

Etymology

From baffle + gab, coined 1952.

  1. derived from *gʰeh₁bʰ-✻
  2. derived from *gabbōną✻
  3. derived from gabba
  4. derived from gabban
  5. derived from gabben
  6. compounded as bafflegab — “baffle + gab”

Definitions

  1. Pretentious, incomprehensible, or overly technical language, especially legal or…

    Pretentious, incomprehensible, or overly technical language, especially legal or bureaucratic jargon.

    • Toss in a few technical terms that most people don't understand—"stochastic" this, "regression" that—and you can use people's justified respect for math and science to get them nodding along. This is granularity as bafflegab.
    • Teachout has a gift for slicing through the bafflegab and revealing that the grifter's patter disguises nothing more than unimaginative, sociopathic scams.

  2. To use pretentious, incomprehensible, or overly technical language.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for bafflegab. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA