tohubohu , also: tohu-bohu

That's speculative; tohubohu's derivation is certain.

To the Editor: David R. Slavitt does not do poetry a service by using the word "tohubohu" to describe today's poetry.

Tohubohu Decrying the current state of poetry, in which there is "no common ground on which poets, critics, scholars, students or even readers (are there any left?)

I steered mechanically through it all, changing gear, stopping, swerving, going through all the rapid actions necessary to getting a vehicle more or less undamaged through that incredible tohubohu.

Tohubohu - unhyphenated, pronounced TOH-hoo BOH-hoo - is similar to brouhaha, "confused uproar," which some etymologists say is a corruption of the Hebrew barukh habba, "blessed be the one who comes"; some trace brouhaha to noisy stage entrances in early French farce.

L'auberge du Tohu-Bohu, which followed in 1897, was another example of "vaudeville-opérette", in which the spoken comedy took a more equal part with the music than in traditional operetta.

Earlier, Rabelais brought the Hebrew word into French as thohu et bohu, and by 1776 Voltaire changed the spelling to tohu-bohu, the form now used for the word in English.

It would be absurd, he says, to call this last a neurosis; it was more like the "tohu-bohu" of Genesis, the meaninglessness of a universe from which the spirit of man was absent.