I wondered about the etymology for “quibble,” and collaterally found out that “-ibble” is an awesome sound for rhyming. There must be something about it that English users really like. I will list them in the order that they happened to occur to me:
Yep, those are all dictionarized words (albeit increasingly urban as you go along). As my brain was going through and making the list for me, they all seemed familiar, at least until we got to “bribble.” That one I had to look up, presuming that it was likely a gap in the pattern, and might not be in use.
Nope. It’s in use. But I am not entirely surprised that I wasn’t familiar with it.
“Vibble” really needs some help, compared to the others.
And to my surprise, when I first checked (at the dictionary level), “zibble” seemed to be pretty much wide open. I just figured that what happens when a letter spends its time mucking about at the end of the alphabet. (That’s no way to go through life, Zed.)
So some are outliers, but still, to have the rest of the set so well filled out? Truly uncommon.
And yes, whenever I collect stuff like this, it tends to turn into a chapter.
Upon being presented with this list, my friend Evan said, “You are proof that the mentally ill often make great contributions to society.”
So I thought that I was done.
But then on a (four years later) whim I went checking for further developments, only to find that “zibble” had suddenly popped up in the urban dictionary, evidently referring to a small refrigerator that is used to chill gnomes that are made of glass. I have no idea what the context might be, as the only reference with the gnomes is in the urban dictionary itself.
It seemed like a one-off, so I did more digging.
Upon which I found a song by The Gap Band entitled, “Zibble, Zibble, Get the Money,” which has scatlike lyrics in it such as “zibble-zibble da-zup-da-zay”... which is light and lovely, but I don’t think that it is intended to have a specific meaning.
And I found a puppet of that name that ran for President in 2016. (Not a political puppet.)
Plus there’s a book about three frogs entitled, “Hibble, Pibble, and Zibble” (from the town of Tibble), by Arthur Strauss.
And while it had become a trademarked name for pet foods (freeze- and air-dried meats) made by a New Zealand company (namely Ziwi), they don’t seem to be using it right now.
There’s also a kobold spirit binder NPC in Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO).
I also noticed that Levi’s has a jeans product named “Dolf Zibble,” about whom I could find nothing further. So I wrote to Levi’s Historian Tracey Panek... who had nothing to add at that time, but is on the lookout for further info.
I finally figured out that “Dolf” is associated with a subset of colors for Levi’s jeans, such as: sunset, nugget, gotta get, hard knock, make it, bombay, and metal. At online stores for such retailers as Macy’s and Kohl’s, those colors are presented in an array of radio-button swatches identified with the captions “Dolf Sunset,” and so on, while others in the set don’t have that pattern. But I’m still not sure what the “dolf” part means in the color name... perhaps an acronym for “Denim Original Leg Fit”?
So that’s still a partial mystery.
Finally, I was delighted to find the character Zanderiffic Zibble Zook, a lover of dictionary reading, who appears in “G is for One Gzonk!: An Alpha-number-bet Book,” by Tony DiTerlizzi. As you no doubt recall, I collect alphabet books.
That discovery inadvertently led me to “zwibble,” which I had never even suspected, and never would have found had it not been for a typo in the reading list for a kindergarten classroom. It turns out that there is a series of books about a dinosaur fairy by the name of It Zwibble.
Which leads to the likes of “quibble,” “wibble,” and a much shorter ancillary list of rhymes.
2024-02