'Gobbledegook'
The right word for a letter sent to an Ohakune business man is gobbledegook. The man, who succes^fully operates one of the town's bigger businesses, received the letter recently from a major Auckland company. "I don't know what it means," he told the Bulletin. "All I know is^hat I've been overcharged $2500." That qualifies the letter for the term gobbledegook, which means pompous and longwinded nonsense. The letter says: "Dear Sir, "We enclose copies of credit notes as requested. "Please note that these are
debit entries and are the contra entries to credits issued for corrections. "The amounts are due for payment as debits even though they are processed by us on credit notes, the credits and debits are issued as credit invoices with either a debit balance or a credit balance. "We trust that this information will enable you to attend to these accounts. "Yoursfaithfully, " In the interests of plain English, we would like to tell you what it means, but we don't know either. And no, it didn't enable the business man to attend to the accounts.
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WAIBUL19850917.2.3
Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka
Waimarino Bulletin, Volume 3, Issue 17, 17 September 1985, Page 1
Word count
Tapeke kupu
180'Gobbledegook' Waimarino Bulletin, Volume 3, Issue 17, 17 September 1985, Page 1
Using this item
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
Ruapehu Media Ltd is the copyright owner for the Waimarino Bulletin. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of Ruapehu Media Ltd. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.