In 1693, Thomas Urquhart and Peter Motteux translated a work by François Rabelais into English, and quite possibly confused everyone with this line: “I find my Brains…metagrabolized and confounded.”
On January 20, 1991, the Sunday Star-News of Wilmington, North Carolina, mystified its readers with: “You don’t need to have your brains metagrobolized by his inscrutable statements to know that something’s amiss.”
In between those events, in 1899, Rudyard Kipling boggled his readers’ minds in “Stalky & Company:” “Come to think of it, we have metagrobolised’em.”
If you’re not sure what’s going on here, then you, too, are metagrobolized. The word was borrowed from Middle French. Its earlier origins are a bit of a mystery, which is entirely appropriate because it means “to puzzle, mystify or confound.” It’s also occasionally used to mean “to untangle” or “to puzzle out,” as it was in the 2007 translation of J. G. Hamann’s work by Kenneth Haynes: “I would matagrobolize further and wider and deeper if I did not know that much study right now wearies the cheer of the listener.” Hamann was a German philosopher in the 1700s, by the way.
The word may have been coined by Rabelais himself, for a story about Gargantua — the giant who’s the protagonist of his novel “Gargantua and Pantagruel.” The first part is from a Greek word meaning silly, and the second part might have come from the Latin word “cribulum,” which meant a sieve. “Cribulum” morphed into “-grabolize” when it was first adopted into Arabic, and then from Arabic into both French and Italian, and finally into English as “garble.”
“Garble,” by the way, didn’t originally mean what it means today. It was a process of sifting spices to separate out the parts you didn’t want. You’d get a bag of, say, peppercorns from some dealer in the market, but before you could use them you’d garble them to make sure your ground pepper would be purer. It was all the way back in the late 1600s that “garble” acquired the meaning we use today: to insert noise or nonsense into a statement to make it less intelligible. It’s not very clear how that happened either, since that makes the statement LESS pure, which would mean that until the 1800s, when the “sift out the junk” meaning of garble began to disappear, “garble” had two opposite meanings at the same time.
The whole business is quite metagrobolizing — but that makes it a good subject for metagrobologists, who are people who like puzzles.
