mumbo-jumbo, gibberish, double dutch, crisscross. Members of the K-pop group NewJeans are embroiled in a dispute with their corporate backers over their creative relationship with an executive producer.

Members of the K-pop group NewJeans are embroiled in a dispute with their corporate backers over their creative relationship with an executive producer.Credit...Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Jon Caramanica
Sept. 25, 2024, 4:50 p.m. ET
A huge part of the success of NewJeans — the most creatively promising new K-pop act of the past two years — has been its music videos: stylistically sophisticated, vividly colorful, palpably joyful. Starting with music that deploys top-shelf songwriting buoyed by production savvy about global microtrends, the group developed a singular aesthetic to go with it, drawing equally from high fashion, lived-in nostalgia and contemporary cuteness.

jumbo (ˈdʒʌmbəʊ)

Definitions

noun

1. informal
   1. a very large person or thing
   2. ((as modifier) ⇒ a jumbo box of detergent
2. See jumbo jet

   noun

   1. informal a type of large jet-propelled airliner that carries several hundred passengers

Word Origin

C19: after the name of a famous elephant exhibited by P. T. Barnum, from Swahili jumbe chief

Jumbo

You have  also  written  that  poetry  represents  "the
mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words. "
But  many feel that the "irrational" has little place in an age
when the exact knowledge of science has begun to plumb the most
profound mysteries of existence. Do you agree? 

 This appearance is very deceptive. It  is  a  journalistic
illusion.  In  point  of  fact,  the greater one's science, the
deeper the sense of mystery. Moreover, I don't believe that any
science  today  has  pierced  any  mystery.  We,  as  newspaper
readers,  are  inclined  to call "science" the cleverness of an
electrician or a psychiatrist's mumbo jumbo. This, at best,  is
applied  science,  and  one  of  the characteristics of applied
science is that  yesterday's  neutron  or  today's  truth  dies
tomorrow.  But  even  in  a  better sense of "science"-- as the
study of visible and palpable nature, or  the  poetry  of  pure
mathematics  and  pure  philosophy--  the  situation remains as
hopeless as ever. We shall never know the origin  of  life,  or
the  meaning  of  life, or the nature of space and time, or the
nature of nature, or the nature of thought.

double dutch
1. Language that cannot be understood, gibberish, as in They might have been speaking double Dutch, for all I understood. This usage dates from the 1870s (an earlier version, however, had it as high Dutch) and is heard less often today than the synonym double talk.
2. A game of jump rope in which players jump over two ropes swung in a crisscross fashion.

mum·bo jum·bo or mum·bo-jum·bo (mŭm'bō-jŭm'bō)
n., pl., -bos, or -bos.

1. Unintelligible or incomprehensible language; gibberish.
2. Language or ritualistic activity intended to confuse.
3. A complicated or obscure ritual.
4. An object believed to have supernatural powers; a fetish.

[Perhaps of Mandingo origin .]

mumbo jumbo (ˈmʌmbəʊ)

Definitions

noun

Word forms: plural, mumbo jumbos

1. foolish religious reverence, ritual, or incantation
2. meaningless or unnecessarily complicated language
3. an object of superstitious awe or reverence

Word Origin

C18: probably from Mandingo mama dyumbo, name of a tribal god