Literary notes about gabble (AI summary)
Literary authors use the term “gabble” to evoke a sense of rapid, sometimes incoherent speech that borders on chaos, whether it be the clamor of a crowded room or the senseless prattle of idle chatter. Its application ranges from describing a flurry of hurried words in a courtroom [1] to satirizing pompous or trivial conversation in both political and artistic contexts [2]. In some passages, “gabble” almost becomes a metaphor for disorderly noise in nature, as when the distant calls of migrating birds are rendered into a surreal soundscape [3]. Other writers employ the word humorously or pejoratively, using it to underscore the futility or absurdity of relentlessly overburdened dialogue [4][5].
- A hurried gabble of words in a crowded court, and she was packed off to gaol.
— from Satan's Invisible World Displayed; or, Despairing Democracy
A Study of Greater New York by W. T. (William Thomas) Stead - He must be used to living on mountain-tops,—and to feeling the wretched gabble of politics and national egotism beneath him.
— from The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist by Nietzsche - High in the air, invisible, migrating wavies winged into the south, the distant gabble of their passing falling weirdly earthward.
— from Deep Furrows by Herbert Joseph Moorhouse - Look alive, now, and don’t let me hear any more confounded gabble, d’ye hear?”
— from Dust: A Novel by Julian Hawthorne - I call it gabble, but I know it to be wisdom.
— from An Arkansas Planter by Opie Percival Read