gubbish

English

Etymology

Blend of garbage +‎ rubbish, coined by Philip K. Dick in his 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip.

Noun

gubbish (uncountable)

1. Anything worthless or incomprehensible; junk.
   • 1990, Norman Spinrad, Science Fiction in the Real World, page 208:

     But by the time the novel is over we are left with the perception that the autistic boy is living in a kind of precog vision of a future decaying into “gubbish,” into a dead simulacrum from which all animating spirit has been leached ( a key Dickian concept ), as real or more so in some sense than the consensus reality of the other characters.

   • 1992, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, page 184:

     All that kipple, gubbish, garble and abomination which Alice James Raccoona Tiptree Sheldon, Jr., showed for what it is when she appeared, smiling a little uncertainly, from her postbox in McLean, Virginia.

   • 2016, Michael Bérubé, The Secret Life of Stories, page 105:

     It rained gubbish, now; all was gubbish, wherever he looked.

   • 2017, Dean Koontz, The Silent Corner, page 102:

     How'd you get your information, the stuff on the index cards? Which, anyway, is probably all gubbish.