I have a fascination with words, and this morning I stumbled upon this combination: skimble-skamble. It appears that this hyphenated set of what I thought were nonsense words are considered to be an adjective that means just what they sound like: rambling and confused or senseless. An example sentence from Dictionary.com is a in quote from a theater critic expounding upon Lewis Carol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: "What a lark it is to tag along after constantly astonished Alice as she meets up with all those skimble-skamble Lewis Carroll creations." The adjective, however did not originate with this enthusiastic critic, according to the dictionary, the most famous example of its usage is also from a passage in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. This example is also said to be the very first use of the words, therefore the origin is said to be the Bard himself. Here is the quote from Henry IV: (Hotspur is speaking of Mortimer’s father.) "Sometimes he angers me / With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant, / Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies, / And of a dragon and a finless fish… / And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff…." What fun the ‘Olde English is!”

There is some discussion, however, about whether or not the Bard actually thought up this entire phrase for the first time. The words themselves tell us exactly what they mean, and there was another word that was in widespread use at the time: ‘scamble.’ This word meant ‘to stumble along.’ Do you suppose the Bard just added skimble to skamble (changing the c to a k) to make some alliteration to fit into the context of the speech by Hotspur? Is it possible that he simply took poetic license with the word, creating something from something that already existed? At any rate, it is a fun phrase, something I think we ought to bring back into the language – what do you think?