Drivel

drivel v. intr.
1. To slobber; drool.
2. To flow like spittle or saliva.
3. To talk stupidly or childishly.

v. tr.
1. To allow to flow from the mouth.
2. To say (something) stupidly.

n.  
1. Saliva flowing from the mouth.
2. Stupid or senseless talk.

[Middle English drevelen, from Old English dreflian.]

Robert Fulford of Canada’s National Post provides several examples of the last definition in a recent column devoted to the silliness of some academic writing. For those unfamiliar with the term, the following gems should lead to understanding, if not of the utterances themselves, then at least of my suggested word.

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Film teacher Kay Armitage writing in the Literary Review of Canada about silent-era Canadian filmmaker Nell Shipman:
"We can see a socio-sexual parallel between the geography of the wilderness and the topographies of narrative in this genre, which organizes a particular spatial itinerary and social anatomy."
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Yale English professor Paul H. Fry, in his A Defense of Poetry:  
"It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness—rather than the will to power—of its fall into conceptuality."
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Aaron Jaffe of the University of Louisville commenting on James Bond’s switching vodka brands:
"(This) carries a metaphorical chain of deterritorialized signifiers, repackaged up and down a paradigmatic axis of associations."
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Leftist academics Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their anti-globalization book Empire:
"In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate."
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Commenting on this last example of drivel, Fulford writes: "To commit a sentence like that is to subtract from the sum of human knowledge."