Dear Kid,

The things I do for you. Seriously. This is me going Above and Beyond in the Mom department.

I’ve been watching Big Bang Theory. There is an episode in which Penny tells Sheldon that she hasn’t seen him recently and misses his jibber jabber. Sheldon asks if she knows where the term “jibber jabber” comes from, and Penny says, “Oh, my God, you’re about to jibber jabber about jibber jabber.”

At that moment, Leonard interrupts to tell them that Howard’s mom is in the hospital (it turns out to be food poisoning, not the fact that Howard is going to marry a shiksah that put her there) and we never learn the etymology of jibber jabber.

Well, that can’t be right.

No, seriously, Sheldon never returns to the subject and we are left uninformed.

So, being that kind of mom, I looked it up.

Turns out that it wasn’t the shock of finding himself in a hospital with all those icky germs that kept Sheldon from telling us about jibber jabber. It’s that it’s boring—seriously boring—and the writers were smart enough to know that saying “jibber jabber” is fun, but talking about it isn’t.

There are no interesting stories. There are no amusing anecdotes. The term just is. No one agrees who invented it. No one cares.

It’s just jibber jabber.

Love, Mom