Nonsensical verbiage uttered by a conman. My favorite example is the Looney Toons character Foghorn Leghorn, who could blather like a carnival barker. I wanted to evoke a circus atmosphere with this piece, each letter becoming its own colorful character. I cut the letters out of recycled mahogany, a fine-grained wood that could hold the twists, turns, edges, and corners of my various fonts. I developed color patterns for each letter to suggest the garments of jesters and clowns, and cut an oval shape from plywood for the baseboard, wrapping it in handmade paper embedded with string to add animation. A circus banner was added to each letter, emblazoned with a synonym for claptrap – flapdoodle, malarkey, tommyrot, poppycock, blather, codswallop, piffle, and looneytoon. And in the end, Foghorn had to join the ensemble.