'And Such a Deal of Skimble-Skamble Stuff'

In Act III, Scene 1 of Henry IV, Part I, Hotspur speaks of Owen Glendower to Glendower's son Mortimer:

“I cannot choose: sometime he angers me

With telling me of the mouldwarp and the ant,

Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies,

And of a dragon and a finless fish,

A clip-wing’d griffin and a moulten raven,

A couching lion and a ramping cat,

And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff

As puts me from my faith.”

 

Skimble-skamble sounds like the name of an early-60’s dance craze. In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson describes it as a “cant word.”  The OED speculates that Shakespeare coined the word, deriving it from scamble, meaning “to make one’s way as best one can; to stumble along,” a mutation of shamble and scramble – not a bad characterization of the way most of us live our lives. The OED cites a remarkably contemporary passage from Burton’s Anatomy using scamble as an intransitive verb:

 

“[W]hen they contemn learning, and think themselves sufficiently qualified, if they can write and read, scamble [scramble in some modern editions] at a piece of evidence, or have so much Latin as that emperor had, qui nescit dissimulare, nescit vivere [“one who knows not how to dissemble”], they are unfit to do their country service, to perform or undertake any action or employment, which may tend to the good of a commonwealth, except it be to fight, or to do country justice, with common sense, which every yeoman can likewise do. And so they bring up their children, rude as they are themselves, unqualified, untaught, uncivil most part . . .”

 

The OED’s definition of scamble as a transitive verb is priceless and recalls a mosh pit: “To struggle with others for money, fruit, sweetmeats, etc. lying on the ground or thrown to a crowd; hence, to struggle in an indecorous and rapacious manner in order to obtain something.”

 

Skimble-skamble repeats a sound with variation, using a nonsense word. Other examples of the same folk-linguistic strategy include wishy-washy and tittle-tattle. As an adjective the word means “confused, incoherent, nonsensical, rubbishy.” As a noun: “confused or worthless discourse. Also, writing of this nature.” In other words, a highly useful word.

 

About another word, mouldwarp, in Hotspur’s speech: “the European mole, Talpa europaea.” The OED cites No. XIII in Geoffrey Hill’s great Mercian Hymns (1971): “The men were paid to caulk water-pipes. They brewed and pissed amid splendour; their latrine seethed its estuary through nettles. They are scattered to your collations, moldywarp.”