What's the difference between babble and blather?

Babble


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To utter words indistinctly or unintelligibly; to utter inarticulate sounds; as a child babbles.
  • (v. i.) To talk incoherently; to utter unmeaning words.
  • (v. i.) To talk much; to chatter; to prate.
  • (v. i.) To make a continuous murmuring noise, as shallow water running over stones.
  • (v. i.) To utter in an indistinct or incoherent way; to repeat, as words, in a childish way without understanding.
  • (v. i.) To disclose by too free talk, as a secret.
  • (n.) Idle talk; senseless prattle; gabble; twaddle.
  • (n.) Inarticulate speech; constant or confused murmur.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Also analogues seem to be the producing of the so-called instinctives as mam(m)a and papa by somewhat older babies which are able to pass over from the babbling into permanent words of the adults' speech in which they persist if used without shifting of sounds since they are produced de novo generation by generation, but they are subordinate to shifting and possible extinction if used in the form of derivatives in the standard language, and some phenomena of the phylogenesis as the survival of less differentiated species contrary to the relatively quick extinction of the highly specialized ones.
  • (2) Then there's me and my buddy Ralph Garman , who does a daily radio show in LA, doing our entertainment podcast Hollywood Babble-On , which is basically just two guys who've worked in showbiz long enough to have informed opinions, sitting around taking the piss out of the entertainment industry.
  • (3) To listen to Gordon Brown this morning was to hear a babble of incoherent assertions, delivered very fast and with striking vigour and confidence, which in no way amount to an intellectual case for power.
  • (4) Phonetic transcriptions of 48 babbling samples from 11 normally hearing subjects, aged 4-18 months, and 39 samples from 14 hearing-impaired (HI) subjects, aged 4-39 months, were analyzed to determine the inventory of consonantal phones for each recording session.
  • (5) Significant monosyllabic-word-list intelligibility improvements are shown in hearing-impaired and in normal-hearing subjects for virtually any environmental noise, including white noise, babble (interfering background conversations), cafeteria noise, high-frequency noise, and low-frequency noise at signal-to-noise ratios to below -20 dB.
  • (6) Furthermore, low-frequency amplification, as used in this study, resulted in no observable degradation in syllable recognition in the presence of multitalker babble.
  • (7) These findings suggest both qualitative and quantitative differences in the babbling of the two groups.
  • (8) Our goal was to illuminate the role of canonical (well-formed syllabic) babbling in the development of speech by mentally retarded children.
  • (9) These findings indicate that for children with specific expressive language delay, vowel babble competes with expressive language, consonantal babble facilitates expressive language, and the length and social responsiveness of babble are independent of expressive language.
  • (10) Thinking of this kind makes Ai not only a great artist, but a thinker of the world's next political and intellectual phase, beyond the turgid babble of contemporary politics.
  • (11) This investigation examined phonetic variation in multisyllable babbling of infants from 0.7 to 0.11.
  • (12) The masking noise is an amplitude-modulated, speech-shaped noise signal, which is designed to simulate a 4-person speech babble in order to assess both the frequency selectivity and the temporal resolution.
  • (13) Acoustic-phonetic differences in the babbling of the two boys were evident in the 8-month sample (the first recording opportunity), and some differences between them became greater over the succeeding samples at 12 and 15 months.
  • (14) Additional testing with a smaller group of patients was carried out with competing noise (speech babble).
  • (15) The role of babbling in language development is not well understood.
  • (16) When both groups listened to speech that had been compressed and presented in a babble, their performance supported a multiplicative distortion theory, with children in the learning disabilities group showing a slightly greater multiplicative effect than the children with no apparent problems.
  • (17) For instance: "Very early experiences need to be rich in touch, face-to-face contact and stimulation through conversation (or reciprocating baby babble).
  • (18) Links between babbling and speech point to innate factors in the ontogeny of spoken language and invite attention to central control mechanisms.
  • (19) For someone who loves art but to whom the art world sounds like babbling in an invented language, this is godsend.
  • (20) Contrary to prevailing accounts of the neurological basis of babbling in language ontogeny, the speech modality is not critical in babbling.

Blather


Definition:

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Indeed, as Brexiteer Boris Johnson dismisses the whole Panama story as the Guardian “blathering”, Mr Cameron could point to the advice of a leading QC, which the TUC publishes on Thursday, which underlines all those EU employment rights which are in fact, very often, all that stands between an otherwise-vulnerable workforce and the footloose global elite.
  • (2) Whatever door of perception that pill is machine-gunning off its hinges, blathering on about the experience through clenched teeth is tedium squared to anyone sober.
  • (3) And because when you have to talk for the sake of talking – which is the job at hand – your blather quotient is going to increase.
  • (4) Professional politicians, and their intellectual menials, will no doubt blather on about “Islamic fundamentalism”, the “western alliance” and “full-spectrum response”.
  • (5) Somehow, a small group of Republican lawmakers have hijacked the national conversation about financial matters to blather about deficits and long-term budgets.
  • (6) Outside this room lurk beheadings and sharia law, a president who is clueless and weak generals blathering away on TV screens.
  • (7) Gameplay The plot may be uninspired fantasy blather, but the side-scrolling brawling is exemplary.
  • (8) "The way that we're living now is good - we're not driven by a desire to get a raise or climb up the ladder because we're pretty much at the top of what we're doing already," he says, and as one-quarter of the most blathered and blogged about band in Britain, he's got a point.
  • (9) "Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity, and spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another."
  • (10) The pharmacist Homais's blather about progress is drawn with as much ruthless precision as the Blind Man's scrofulous face, Emma's final agony or her husband's uselessness.
  • (11) 3.50pm: Birmingham City's Chris Hughton has been asked if he would be interested in replacing Roy – at Wes Brom, not England (yet) – and blathered on about concentrating on the play-offs.
  • (12) So the Church of England has turned a great opportunity to show why it still had a role as a voice of the voiceless in our divided society into a profoundly dispiriting display of back-biting, bitching and blathering on about health and safety concerns and the lost income from tourists.
  • (13) David Moyes blathering on about how Man Utd's 1-0 defeat to Liverpool was the best under his tenure was a bit rich, reviews Daniel Taylor .
  • (14) And, too, because no matter how much practice you have at blathering and how much boilerplate you can regurgitate, unscripted moments can be as rough on cable heads as on politicians.
  • (15) The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn't.
  • (16) 4.42pm BST "Currently sitting in an all day professional development class to keep my teaching license," blathers Scott Stricker.
  • (17) It’s a principle that Conservative politicians blathering about conflict with Spain over Gibraltar would do well to study.
  • (18) His famed negotiating technique is to propose an exorbitant figure, then let the producer blather and rail about budgets only to find an eerie silence on the end of the phone.
  • (19) 7.04pm BST "Having cycled through London today I was impressed by the sheer number of jolly Dortmund fans enjoying themselves," blathers Adam Brown.
  • (20) She doesn't do much of the chattering class's news cycle blathering.