The word immatriculation means registration, and comes from the word immatriculer (to register), which comes from the Medieval Latin immatriculare (to join).
#ORIGIN OF JIBBER JABBER REGISTRATION#
Yesterday I learnt that the French for a number plate / license plate / vehilce registration plate is une plaque d’immatriculation. The name Nottingham comes from Snotingaham – Snot’s people’s (inga) homestead (ham). Apparently an old Brythonic name for that area was Tig Guocobauc, (Place of Caves). Perhaps a better Welsh name for it would be Caerddewi (Dewi’s fort).Īnother interesting name that came up was Tre’r Ogof (“Town of the Cave”), which is the Welsh for Nottingham. The name was recorded as Deusberie, Deusberia, Deusbereia or Deubire in the Doomsday Book of 1086. The English name is thought to come from the Welsh name Dewi, an equivalent of David, and the Old English word burh (fort). Twmpyn is a diminutive of twmp, which means hillock, knoll, mound, pile or lump.ĭewsbury is a town in West Yorkshire in the north of England. My favourite was Twmpyn y Glori (“Little Hillock / Knoll of Glory”), which is apparently what you call Dewsbury in Welsh.
I knew quite a few of them, but some were new to me. I respectfully submit therefore that this may not in fact be a Britishism at all.At the Welsh conversation group I went to tonight we had a quiz, part of which involved matching Welsh names for places in England to their English equivalents. Which brilliantly apes Tolkien’s interminable appendices which do include two kings of Arthedain named Argeleb who are ancestors of Aragorn and many other Args, “*Either Arglebargle IV or someone else.” “In the same year, the 1,623rd year of the Third Age, the Naugahyde brothers, Brasso and Drano, led a large following of boggies across the Gallowine River disguised as a band of itinerant graverobbers and took control from the high King at Ribroast. I do however remember Arglebargle appearing in the 1969 Harvard Lampoon spoof Bored of the Rings: You are grounded.Īlso a Brit who is 52 and has a semi-autistic obsession with words and has never heard arglebargle used in conversation or writing and also misread it as argie-bargie which would be a fracas, brawl or particularly noisy and violent verbal argument and is quite common particularly in London – IIRC the curry house in the popular BBC soap Eastenders is for instance called the Argie-Bargie (or perhaps -Bhaji I’ve never actually seen it spelled). A couple of years ago, Alex Beam wrote in a New York Times op-ed about conflicts in the Episcopal church, “The schismatics invoke endless biblical argle-bargle to defend their un-Christian bigotry.” And just last week, a commenter on the Portland (Oregon) Mercury website humorously responded to a silly season article about how breakfast is overrated: “Shame on you and all those who truck with such joy-murdering argle-bargle.”īottom line, there is life in argle-bargle (I like that version better), so I say have some fun with it. One time he criticized Attorney General Eric Holder because “he thinks this isn’t nearly enough racial argy-bargy” another, he ripped an Obama energy ad for “endless stream of intellectual jibber-jabber and nonsensical argy-bargy.”Įlsewhere, the terms appear only intermittently.
One veritable fount of spottings is the right-wing National Review, especially its writer Jonah Goldberg, who prefers the argy-bargy form and uses it incessantly. Naturally, this led me to look into the investigate the popularity of argle-bargle and argy-bargy in these parts. Originally meaning a squabble, argument, or bandying of words–it rises from a Scottish variant of argue–its meaning has broadened to include meaningless talk or writing, nonsense. Today, he presents a British phrase, argle-bargle, and notes: In his always illuminating Baltimore Sun blog, “You don’t Say,” John McIntyre offers a word of the week.
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