Gibberish refers to speech or writing that is meaningless, incomprehensible, or nonsensical. It’s language that sounds like it might mean something but actually doesn’t convey any real information or message. There is technical gibberish, which is when someone uses complex jargon or technical terms incorrectly or excessively, making their speech incomprehensible to others. Like throwing around buzzwords without substance. Then there is baby talk or developmental gibberish, which is babbling sounds infants make before they learn actual words, which often sounds like they’re having conversations but isn’t real language yet. Occasionally you hear what you might call intentional gibberish, which is nonsense created on purpose for entertainment, like Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” poem, with lines like “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves…” And then there is sounds-like-language gibberish, which mimics the rhythm and flow of real speech but uses made-up words. For example: “Flibber nabbit wizzle grok!” It follows language patterns but has no actual meaning. The word “gibberish” itself comes from the imitation of sounds in medieval times that charlatan alchemists would make, pretending to speak in mystical languages. Today we use “gibberish” to describe anything that sounds like language but lacks meaning or coherence.
After a long day of high-altitude cavorting on Dillon Lake and then even higher in Breckenridge (9,700 feet), we all had enough cotton wool in our heads to make us feel loggy and talk a bit of gibberish. While others shopped the many cutesy stores for mountain trinkets (the physical manifestation of gibberish), I positioned myself in an Adirondack chair made out of old skis. The funny thing was that those “old” skis were so much newer than the last set of skis I owned in 2007 when I stopped skiing and WAY more advanced than the skis I learned to ski on in 1966. The ski chair was set in front of a carved wooden troll that is sort of a symbol of Breckenridge.
I actively skied for most of those 40 years bracketed by my ski ownership history. In fact, I’ve been to Summit County several times to ski Breckinridge, Keystone, Copper Mountain and Arapahoe Basin. I remember them well. I was a pretty good skier in my day and taught all of my kids to ski. These days, only Tom actively skis, though Carolyn takes her daughters out to the slopes occasionally. They were all good skiers in the day. Now I sit in a ski town resembling a troll and mumbling gibberish due to mild oxygen deprivation. The phases of life never cease to surprise us.
I will say that as much cotton head and cotton mouth as I have at this altitude these days, I have been able to function in a respiratory sense by virtue of taking That Diamox I had prescribed for this trip. I can’t swear it’s what’s keeping me functional, but I am prepared to give it some of the credit and I do recommend it for any aging Baby Boomers who don’t have the good sense to stay down at sea level. Since posting my first story a few weeks ago on altitude, I have had far more feedback from readers who have cautioned me about going to altitude and who have both funny and terrifying tales of altitude sickness. So, order your Diamox now.
It was time to wander back to the Airbnb, so everyone could get a nap in before dinner. Then Tom & Jenna, with assist from Roger and Kim, put on a BBQ spread that screamed summer vacation. Hot dogs, cheeseburgers, chicken, baked beans, and my favorite…corn on the cob. It was a classic and well-executed spread that is being replicated all across America this Saturday night. In fact, we will do this again in Golden in two nights at some friend’s house, just to make that point.
After dinner, I was summoned to the downstairs playroom for a parlor game bring orchestrated by son-in-law John. It was a game called Gibberish. We split into two teams and John showed cards alternately to each team with what looked like words on them, but was, indeed… gibberish. Under the constraint of an egg timer, we had to guess what the gibberish was intended to convey. Part of the “fun” was supposed to come from the fact that the reverse side of the card had the answer and was visible to the opposing team. Therefore, all the verbal machinations are out there in the universe to give everyone in the room a good laugh. So imagine a game where a handful of adults are trying to read gibberish words in combination in order to figure out what they are actually intended to convey, all while being laughed at for their efforts. This is a very special brand of fun that is actually very disconcerting to the mind of a thinking person. To begin with, there is no particular value in turning a simple expression into gibberish only to see if an group of people can reverse engineer that gibberish back into the original expression. Games like Trivial Pursuits leave you with tidbits of knowledge. Charades reminds you of favorite movies, books or TV shows. Monopoly makes you ponder business strategies and the meaning of luck in business. The game of Life causes you to consider what matters most to you as you go about your life. But Gibberish leaves you with absolutely nothing but a wonder about what sort of demented person would make up such a game.
As I sat back trying to disengage from the madness of the game, all of my direct descendants were on my team, while all the spouses were on the opposing team. It was at that point that my brood was proven worse at gibberish than the spouses, though I’m not sure what that says about either team. We also realized that the best strategy was to have some people rapidly repeat the gibberish phonetically and other people listen to that gibberish and try to think of what it might possibly convey. I suppose that some added fun comes from the surrounding circumstances. For instance, when Hank the dog decided to butt scoot across the Airbnb rug, the gibberish phrase in play happened to be “My butt is a little itchy”. It turns out the highlight of the evening was the phonetic expression for “Cold Shower”, which daughter-in-law Valene outed herself by screaming at the top of her lungs, “Golden Shower!” That pretty much ended the evening in a fit of laughter. What can I say, you either want to engage in senseless, ribald fun or not. If you do, go buy a deck of Gibberish cards.