galimatias

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“
Our geography was galimatias, and book-keeping a crime: the people must not think they were on a level with the learned, and the children must do this and that.

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Definitions (4)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. noun Nonsense; gibberish.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (2)

Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (1)

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Examples (28)

  • Tosticated, meaning 'perplexed', and galimatias, a lovely synonym for 'nonsense'.
  • What if, a la Dylan, many of his lyrics were just trendy-sounding galimatias? —  Top Stories - Google News
  • Our geography was galimatias, and book-keeping a crime: the people must not think they were on a level with the learned, and the children must do this and that. —  The Young Seigneur Or, Nation-Making
  • That remarkable letter in which Winckelmann announces his change of religion is a real galimatias, an unfortunate and confused document The first half of our own collection serves to make this period comprehensible, yea, immediately intelligible. —  The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 02 Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English. in Twenty Volumes
  • She described his young friend almost as well as he would have done, from the point of view of her type, her graces, her plastic value, using various technical and critical terms to which the old lady listened in silence, solemnly, rather coldly, as if she thought such talk much of a galimatias: she belonged to the old-fashioned school and held a pretty person sufficiently catalogued when it had been said she had a dazzling complexion or the finest eyes in the world Qu'est-ce que c'est que cette merveille?" —  The Reverberator
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Etymologies (2)

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  1. French.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. Formerly also gallimatias; from French galimatias, nonsense, gibberish. According to Huet, the term arose from the blundering speech of a certain advocate, who, pleading in Latin the cause of a man named Matthew, whose cock had been stolen, often used, instead of gallus Matthiæ, Matthew's cock, the words galli Matthias, the cock's Matthew! But this story is doubtless a mere concoction, suggested by the form of the word. It is perhaps merely a popular variation of galimafrée, a medley: see gallimaufry.
 

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