Gostak

Gostak is a meaningless noun that is used in the phrase "the gostak distims the doshes", which is an example of how it is possible to derive meaning from the syntax of a sentence even if the referents of the terms are entirely unknown.

The phrase was coined in 1903 by Andrew Ingraham but is best known through its quotation in 1923 by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in their book The Meaning of Meaning, and has been since referred to in a number of cultural contexts.

Coined in 1903 by Andrew Ingraham, the sentence became more widely known through its quotation in 1923 by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in their book The Meaning of Meaning (p. 46).

Ogden and Richards refer to Ingraham as an "able but little known writer", and quote his following dialogue:

This can be seen in the following dialogue:

In this case, it is possible to describe the relationships between the terms in the sentence—that the gostak is that which distims the doshes, that distimming is what the gostak does to the doshes, and so on—even though there is no fact of the matter about what a gostak or doshes actually are.

The phrase appears in a number of subsequent cultural contexts including:

Dr. Miles Breuer wrote a story, published in Amazing Stories for March 1930 and now considered a classic, titled "The Gostak and the Doshes" whose protagonist pops into an alternate world in which the phrase is a political slogan that induces sufficient umbrage throughout the populace to declare justified, righteous war. Other writers have picked up on the reference, notably David Gerrold.

The phrase is the namesake of an interactive fiction game called The Gostak, written by Carl Muckenhoupt. Most of the text of the game is in an entirely unknown language (fundamentally English in syntax and grammar, but with much of the vocabulary and even idiomatic constructions changed) which the player must decipher. For example, the game opens with the following text:

...
Wikipedia