rhubarb rhubarb

Interjection

(chiefly UK)

1. (UK) Background noise of simultaneous conversations, none of which is decipherable since the actors are repeating the word rhubarb or other words with similar attributes.
   • Those glottals glugged like poured pop, each /rebarbative syllable, remembrancer, raise /‘mob' rhubarb-rhubarb to a tribune's speech /crossing the crackle as the hayracks blaze...1981: Tony Harrison, The Rhubarbarians I in collection Continuous: 50 sonnets from 'The School of Eloquence' . Rex Collings, London (1981)
   • (stage direction) They all rise and drink. Rhubarb, rhubarb...To convey the next stage of To convey the next stage of general inebriation, the remarks that follow are spoken in a sing-song.1983, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Victory Celebrations
2. (UK, derogatory) Speech which is undecipherable to the listener because it is in a language he or she does not understand; mumbo jumbo.
   • Human beings and human speech are historical inventions as well: our actual experience for long enough was of ‘ourselves', the local tribes of people, dogs and horses, and of the ‘others', theria (wild beasts) and barbaroi (who make noises that only vaguely sound like speech, as "rhubarb, rhubarb").1997, Stephen R L Clark, Animals and Their Moral Standing
   • ‘Barbarians' who made noises which sounded like ‘rhubarb-rhubarb' to Greeks who could not (and did not want to) understand them.1998, Richard Wallace, Wynne Williams, The Three Worlds of Paul of Tarsus
3. (UK) Blah blah; etc, etc.
   • Not allowed to blah blah blah rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb. Just what I don't need when I'm feeling kind of seedy.1998, Brigid Lowry, Guitar Highway Rose
   • Judith recruited me as the voice of the grass roots. I said rhubarb, rhubarb to oblige her, but I felt like a charlatan. I had mobilized out of a genuine sense of outrage at Cathy's treatment, but the demand to enter the Oxford Union was another matter.2001, Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties