Abstract

Grommelot is the supposedly gibberish or nonsense language invented by the comici dell’arte for use in rehearsal and performance. I say ‘supposedly’ because gibberish is meaningless, whereas grommelot is meaningful. Nonsense can be resorted to anytime and anywhere, often to obscure, whereas grommelot is context specific and comprehensible. Michel Saint-Denis called it ‘the music of meaning’: not nonsense at all, but the distillation of sense into onomatopoeic vocalisation (Saint-Denis 1982). Antonin Artaud was fascinated by it, finding as he did that words were a barrier to meaning rather than an intensifier of it. Other orthographies for this made-up language are ‘grammelot’ or ‘grumelot’; sometimes with one ‘m’, sometimes with two; sometimes in the singular, sometimes the plural. My preference for ‘grommelot’ is based on the following etymology: