Scat. Cat.

I started thinking about scat singing a couple of days ago. 

Not scatological, of or pertaining to shit.

But the jazz inflection that used the human voice as an instrument substituting made up nonsense sounds for musical effect.

Like in the clip above, with Ella and Mel Tormé playfully dueling.

I suppose scat has been around as long as language itself has been around.

Not all that long ago in The New York Times there was a great piece on archaeologists using AI to fill in some of the missing pieces in Gilgamesh--one of the world's oldest known books.

When Gilgamesh was first told 5000 years ago around a campfire under a sky with a trillion stars in Mesopotamia, the people who retold the tale didn't have PowerPoint slides to read from. Gilgamesh, like the Hebrew Torah (not the Christian sequel) like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, sprang from an oral tradition.

That's not as dirty as it sounds.

It just means stories were told aloud, sung even, and memorized through their rhymes and melodies and repetitions, like rosy-fingered dawn and wine-dark seas. My guess is even the best reciters of such tales on occasion got lost in their sauce. They forgot their way. They meandered (which, btw, is a river, the Menderes, in Turkiye.) So they did the Sumerian, or Aramaic or archaic Greek equivalent of scatting.

When Ralph Kramden was caught with his size 44 pants down and humina'd, that too was scatting.

Today, about fifty times a day I see something, usually from a 
SME or a thought-leader or a KOL (key opinion leader) or an agency website, press-release or executive. 

I respect the written word. And I generally try to read what lands in front of me. But, like I said, about fifty times a day, I see pure nonsense. Either platitudes, un-founded pontification, or something so ungodly and obtuse and confusing that I get pissed off. The worst are the instances of people trying to sound smart when they don't actually know what they're saying, what it means or why they're banging their particular drum. Then of course there are the flat-out lies. 

Most of the commercials we see, 49-seconds of awful side effects, I'm Dick Weed, and I approved this messages, just $49.99 for the triple-play bundle, the so-and-so winter leasestravaganza are all scatting.

All this is scatting.

Scat. And scatter. Lest you splatter.