Stanley Unwin, sometimes billed as
Professor Stanley Unwin, was more than just a British
comedian and comic writer. He was an inventor of his
own language, "Unwinese," referred to in
the film Carry On Regardless as "gobbledegook".
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, his "Unwinese" was
a special and mangled form of English in which only
a few words were intelligible; this was enough to make
the listener think he was being talked to - but without
actually allowing him to understand the sentence concerned,
the effect of which was make the listener feel deaf
or daft.
On a more serious front, as well as being useful
for entertainment purposes, Unwin's use of language
also gives us an insight into the way our minds understand
words. |