“Daddy told me to tell you that I don’t know what he hired you for and not to tell me. That I’m totally untrustworthy. I’m a flibbertigibbet. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
That scene from Joe Versus the Volcano is what always comes to my mind when I think of flibbertigibbet. Others think first of The Sound of Music:
“How do you find a word that means Maria? A flibbertigibbet? A will-o’-the-wisp? A clown?”
I have to wonder where else in popular entertainment flibbertigibbet has been used. It’s such a lovely, lively word – like a flapper fluttering in furs and taffeta, or a flivver’s flat tire flip-flopping on the tarmac. (Or, I suppose, like a gibbeted robber babbling deliriously for a final filbert, though that’s rather unpleasant.) It’s a word that expresses in sound the idea “Why say one thing when you can say two? Why say two when you can say three?”
It expresses it in its history, too. In its earliest forms, flibbertigibbet seems to have been just flibbergib, a kind onomatopoeia of bafflegab, folderol, rigmarole, and ad libitum hocus pocus – the daily verbal traffic of the average gossiping tattletale: a merge of flibber and gib, two and one to make three to make one. But why have one syllable of gib when you can have two of gibbet (with that little diminutive – a creditable derivative, though indubitably punitive, with its adventitious baleful overtone), and why have two of flibber when you can have three of flibberti (we could as readily spell it flibber-de-gibbet, which would make it rather oojah-cum-spiff)?
And that is the basic origin of the flibbertigibbet: someone for whom words multiply, a person who simply can’t not say – originally a flattering sycophant or a gossip, but now evolved to mean a flighty person, one who may well babble endlessly but who in any event is as firm and easy to follow as a butterfly. And, of course, social stereotypes being what they are, a flibbertigibbet has generally been thought of as a woman.
There were, to be sure, attempts to turn flibbertigibbet another way. Shakespeare and Walter Scott both gave it as a name to a demon or imp – in Scott’s Kenilworth, what the OED calls “an impish-looking, mischievous, and flighty urchin.” Meaning, perhaps, a sort of devilish ragamuffin. But it didn’t stick. Now it’s not the Artful Dodger or Puck, or a little Beelzebub; it’s Meg Ryan or Julie Andrews. Well, I’d rather adorable than abominable.
Sesquiotica 