mumbo jumbo

mumbo jumbo

Speech or writing that is nonsensical, overly complicated, or full of confusing jargon, to the point of being incomprehensible or unintelligible. Primarily heard in UK. Look, just skip the legal mumbo jumbo and tell me how much I'll be inheriting. My wife goes to this healer who just chants mumbo jumbo for half an hour. I think he's a con artist, but she swears that it helps her back pain.
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • be full of beans
  • mean nothing
  • full of prunes
  • prune
  • full of beans
  • fib
  • ask a silly question and you get a silly answer
  • ask a stupid question and you'll get a stupid answer
  • be out of (one's) face
  • out of (one's) brain
References in periodicals archive
It's not as disorienting as Mumbo Jumbo but probably faster.
Mumbo Jumbo: Try out the recordbreaking steepest drop (2009) on the Mumbo Jumbo ride Kumali: It's a roaring success when you hit speeds of 56mph with the Kumali ride named after the male lion in the pride.
Even more pointedly, the criticisms of new ethnography are directly related to the absence of Mumbo Jumbo from the scholarship of folklore and fiction.
The Mumbo Jumbo ride, which opened last year, is the showpiece of the park near Pickering.
And this is not mumbo jumbo philosophy, it emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience.--UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO NEUROLOGIST V.S.
WITH GREAT trepidation and a roar of religious mumbo jumbo, many Saudis are opting for a matrimonial loophole known as the misyar (or "visit") marriage, a form of clandestine matrimony in which the woman gives up any spousal rights and stays in her own residence, the man visits her for sex, and after a while the union is dissolved by a divorce.
How mumbo jumbo conquered the world; a short history of modern delusions.
If we don't send that ominous envelope out and have you sign all that legal mumbo jumbo, then later in the year, we can't legally do what it takes to keep your child (upon whom, if you've sent us a thinking, caring citizen, we will never have to impose that 'draconian catalogue of subsequent consequences') safe at school.
Fascinating and treacherous, Kara Walker's new multimedia installation, titled Fibbergibbet and Mumbo Jumbo: Kara E.
Vodou, or at least the way it is portrayed in the popular press and movies, has always brought to mind things spooky, mumbo jumbo, the living dead, superstition.
So was his 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo, in which the mostly black defenders of "Jes Grew" (the ancient spirit of joy and celebration that originated with the Egyptian god Osiris) do battle with the mostly white "Atonists" who want to stamp it out.
Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, Carlos Fuentes's Terre Nostra, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo.
Call me old- fashioned, but this is not going to' open up foreign markets or cut your costs, it's just mumbo jumbo which is diverting many people's attention from real business issues.
In discussing The National Gallery Complete Illustrated Catalogue on CD-ROM, I can promise the almost total absence of technical mumbo jumbo. I can make that promise firmly and unequivocally not because I am particularly virtuous about keeping promises, but because I lack knowledge of technical mumbo jumbo.
"Mumbo Jumbo," a $3 million pic, toplines Monty Python's Terry Jones and is described as a quirky British comedy about a young man who gets mistaken for the local folklore hero, the Mumbo Jumbo, and is expected to perform a miracle.