19 February 2026

How effective is gibberish? (with examples from arts and sciences)

First, what is gibberish? It is same as jibber-jabber or gobbledygook, and is often synonymous to balderdash or claptrap. It is nonsense or the effect of being nonsense created by pseudowords which make the language sound confusing and unintelligible, like

"Whithugat havithuge ithugi mithugissed?"

💡to get the message, find a section which is recurrent for all words and skip it when reading

Sure, we are not supposed to use gibberish in our everyday and professional life, but there are examples in history when it became a cherry on a cake for people of arts and an important part of research for scientists.

We put the stories in a chronological order to follow how humans have been dealing with gibberish through time.

Literature: Having fun and gaining popularity

Lewis Carroll adored mathematical paradoxes as well as word games and, of course, could not miss an opportunity to play with gibberish. He mastered it as a literary device and wrote a whole poem in a made-up language which has no meaning outside this particular piece of literature. To keep a chance for the readers to understand the plot, Lewis Carroll used some real English words and calibrated rhythm and rhyme in the poem for it to better outline the context.

Imagine making a translation of such a piece…

And now imagine that the poem has been translated into 42(!) languages, some of which have got several translated versions by now. A few years ago, Malmö University scholars gathered the works and even included scientific insights and commentaries upon the history of translation of "Jabberwocky".

Cinematography: Finding a compromise between the actor and the audience

After 45 years of gibberish enjoying attention in literature, it also found its way to cinematography. These were the times when the very first films with sound dialogues had already appeared while silent films were still flourishing. The leading actor was Charlie Chaplin who had not voiced out a word from the screen for about 20 years of playing. The audience was extremely curious about his real voice, and the actor didn’t really want to ruin the image and the character he had created.

To solve the dilemma, he decided to introduce a song instead of a plain dialogue. And to make the song both unique and suitable for his film, Chaplin composed it himself making the lyrics completely gibberish.
According to the scene, the Tramp lost the lyrics to the real song he was going to perform and started improvising.

Titine or The Nonsense Song became the closing scene in the Modern Times released in 1936, which is also the last film where the character of the Little Tramp appeared.

Another example where gibberish was used as a compromise is Home Alone. Remember the language (or rather the noises) Harry, one of the bandits, uses when caught into traps little Kevin set. The sounds are meant to be curses but to make the series acceptable for the whole family, the actor Joe Pesci avoided swearing for real and invented hiw own gibberish.

Scenic performance: Conducting an experiment

Some 50 years ago, an Italian singer Adriano Celentano wrote a gibberish song with English-sounding lyrics and made it a hit. Many European creators and artists were influenced by American culture, and according to one of the legends, Adriano wanted to write a song which would encourage people to communicate in spite of a language barrier. Another story goes that the singer’s real intention was to prove that Italians would enjoy any song which sounded like American English, even when they don’t understand the meaning. And there was no real meaning in this song.

Whether it was for the singer’s charm or for the song’s authenticity, the Prisencolinensinainciusol (that’s the name of the song) indeed gained the hearts and even appeared in television sketches and series. Not to mention a number of recent ad campaigns, the last such appearance was noticed already in 2026 during the Winter Olympics opening ceremony!

Cognitive and behavioural sciences: Discovering human body’s secrets

Medical scientists and physiologists who study acoustics have been using "nonwords" or gibberish for years to explore how human organisms behave or react to certain conditions. In many cases, scientists have to use nonsense words to minimise the impact of uncontrollable conditions (e.g., previous knowledge or even an accidental guess by a participant) and eliminate biased results.

Some of the conclusions reached in the studies which involved nonsensical words include:

Machine learning: Human-machine and human-robot interaction

Computer science: Understanding AI chatbots deeper

🎁Bonus story

Remember the experiment Adriano Celentano conducted on his Italian audience? There was a similar case in science, too.

A group of PhD students created a software to generate pseudo-scientific papers by mixing up random titles, texts, and graphic materials. They did it for entertainment and to prove that some conferences would accept fake papers. The issue resulted in more than 100 such papers being published. The hoax appeared to be so "successful" that the articles produced by this particular software were said to be spotted years after the first such case had taken place, and Springer decided to sponsor another project to detect all the "products".

Read more here: https://news.mit.edu/2015/how-three-mit-students-fooled-scientific-journals-0414

...and here: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14763

Our list of how people made use of nonsensical during the latest centuries is, of course, not exhaustive but, similarly to a broken watch which is still certain to be right twice a day, doesn’t it demonstrate that even gibberish can make sense if you know how to make the most of it?🙃