Inexplicably, some quite handy words that can be used to point out someone’s lack of intellectual capacity have become quite obscure. This is in spite of current events, which certainly seem to be particularly characterized by individuals with such shortcomings. One word that’s quite rare but pretty expressive is “jobbernowl.”
“Jobbernowl” simply means a stupid person; a dunce. It seems to have arisen in the late 1800s; the writer Hall Caine used it in his novels in the 1890s. Usage seems to have declined after that, but you can hear it in the 1940 film The Bank Dick, when a character says “Surely, don’t be a luddie-duddie, don’t be a moon-calf, don’t be a jabbernowl; you’re not those, are you?”
The word hasn’t completely disappeared. The 1999 book Henry Mitchell on Gardening includes the line “When I discovered I could grow it here — I like to say any jobbernowl can — I was as pleased as a dog with two tails.”
“Jobbernowl” comes from the French word “jobard,” which in turn comes from “jobe,” which means silly. “Noll” meant the top of the head. The word’s original meaning was someone who simply looked stupid — that is, their head did. It didn’t take long before it was used for real stupidity, not just what looked like it. The related word forms “jobbernowlry” and “jobbernowlism.” “Jobbernowlry” appeared in print (a rare occurrence) in the 1985 book Gods of Riverworld by Philip José Farmer: “‘Sheer jobbernowlry, darkest superstition,’ Burton had said.”
The Riverworld books depict the entirely plausible events that ensue when, for no apparent reason, every human that’s ever lived (between prehistory and about 2100, or thereabouts), wakes up all at the same time on a perfectly reasonable world that has a single huge feature: a river that spirals from the north pole all the way to the south pole. The “Burton” in the citation above is one of the main characters, Sir Richard Francis Burton, the British explorer and writer from the 1800s. He’s the translator — or at least one of the translators — of One Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights).
One of the creatures (or monsters, for that matter) in The Arabian Nights is the “roc,” a giant bird with a particularly unpleasant disposition. The word is from the Arabic “rukhkh,” which in turn arose from the Persian word “rukh.” The creature wasn’t mentioned only in The Arabian Nights; Marco Polo also mentioned it in his description of Madagascar, which he probably got away with because in those days nobody was fact-checking anything. “Roc” became pretty well known because of the extreme popularity of The Arabian Nights, which was probably because of Burton’s translation. He didn’t leave anything out and the book was considered pornographic at the time. Because everybody had read it anyway, the phrase “roc’s egg” entered common usage in the 1800s to mean something “marvelous or prodigious”. The details of the book are nowhere near as widely known any more, of course, and if you refer to a “roc’s egg” nowadays some jobbernowl will doubtless laugh and remind you that “rocks don’t lay eggs”!
