Mouthing Off

When I told my sister, Liz, that Zoom was ending production and taking Ubbi Dubbi with it, she had only one thing to say.

"Uboh nubo."

"Uboh yubes," I said. "Ubub-bubi dububbubi ubis dubead."

For Gen Xers who came of age when the cultural landscape was substantially less cluttered, the locally produced PBS children's show Zoom was PlayStation 2, Nickelodeon, and the Internet rolled into one. The theme song is hard-wired into a generation's brain, and Bernadette, a star for two seasons and the inventor of the magical butterfly arm twirl, was famous enough to warrant a single name.

But the crown jewel of the show - cooler even than Bernadette - is its secret language: Ubbi Dubbi. By saying "ub" before every vowel sound, you render English into what seems, to the uninitiated, like gibberish. The language, used in the show's skits and spoofs, can be mastered by your average 6-year-old in about 10 minutes, but parents can never quite seem to get the hang of it - which drives them crazy. It is cloak-and-dagger for the preteen set. It's perfect.

This week, after running sporadically since 1972, Zoom is airing its last original episode, and Ubbi Dubbi seems destined to follow Sumerian and Ubykh into the ossuary of dead languages. In France they speak French, in Korea, Korean. How could there be Ubbi Dubbi without Zoom?

I figured that if I could find out where Ubbi Dubbi came from, I might be able to get a handle on where it was headed, so I called the good people of WGBH. Kate Taylor, the executive producer of Zoom who was there almost from the start, says she heard that the language was conceived in a brainstorming session during the first or second season.

"Not so," says James

Field, one of the original directors. He suspects the idea came to the program in the mail during the first season - at its peak, Zoom was getting 10,000 letters a week from kids around the country. Another theory has it that Bill Cosby invented the language and popularized it through a character on Fat Albert.

Henry Becton, president of WGBH and a producer in 1972, says they're all wrong. "I knew it as a kid in Jersey," he says, speaking of a time 20 years before Zoom was on the air. "And my father knew something pretty close to it when he was a kid. It's been in American kid culture for at least four generations."

Children's language games, it turns out, are notoriously undocumented. Kids teach them to other kids on the playground, not in the classroom, "so they're not legislated," says Bert Vaux, a professor of linguistics at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. And since many of the words that toddlers speak are gibberish, new languages are generated with some regularity.

Vaux, who has made a study of Ubbi Dubbi, guesses its predecessors trace to the dawn of American English in the 17th century. But certainly there were antecedents. Hindu priests developed a form of gibberish to help remember the Vedic hymns around 1000 BC, and virtually every spoken language has its own version that only children speak.

French youths use a reverse slang called verlan, says Field, who lives in Paris. "It drives parents crazy here, too."

Ubbi Dubbi may be like Latin. It won't disappear, says Vaux; it will just evolve into something else. Someone, somewhere, somehow will be driving parents batty with it - or something like it - for generations to come.

My sister now has a child of her own, and the other day, the 3-year-old started saying something that sounded awfully familiar. For a moment, it occurred to me that it might be Ubbi Dubbi, but I couldn't quite make it out. When I asked him what he was saying, he just looked up at me and laughed.