Mock Writing
Mock writing is a pictorial form of nonsense often found in cartoons. Mock writing consists of predominantly meaningless, unintelligible marks like squiggles, scrawling, doodles, or sometimes just parallel straight lines. The meaningless marks look like writing that is somewhat out of focus or too far away to be seen clearly enough to read. Mock writing resembles writing, but it conveys no meaningful content or message.
The purpose of mock writing in cartoons is to create an illusion or impression of writing. Sometimes cartoonists draw in a few actual letters among the meaningless marks to enhance the illusion. Also, the placement of the meaningless marks in the cartoon shows us they are supposed to represent writing. Cartoonists inscribe mock writing on some other figure in the drawing—a flip chart or a poster on a wall or lamppost. The convention signals that something is supposedly written there, but we are not to try to decipher it. The meaning does not matter because there is no meaning.
Smudgy equations and mathematical symbols scrawled on a blackboard are another familiar form of mock writing. To most people, they epitomize the incomprehensibility of modern science. In fact, they are probably the best-known cartoon icon of unintelligibility.
Nonsense Letters
Nonsense letters are meaningless, unintelligible marks that imitate the general appearance of alphabetic letters. However, they do not belong to any actual, existing alphabet. The person who invents such marks has actual letters in mind as a sort of model. Still, nonsense letters are not exact replicas of actual letters.
Some children with developmental disabilities draw nonsense letters. When they are asked to draw letters of the alphabet, they draw meaningless marks that resemble letters instead. This shows that they have a vague idea of what letters look like but are unable to copy them.
Dr. Seuss made up an entire nonsense alphabet of meaningless letters, such as “yuzz.” In On Beyond Zebra he explained, “There are things beyond Z that most people don’t know.” He needed extra letters because:
In the places I go there are things that I see
That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.
I’m telling you this cause you’re one of my friends.
My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends.
Dr. Seuss’s purpose was humor. However, people have created nonsense letters and nonsense alphabets for fraud, hoaxes, or imposture, using concocted nonsense letters to create meaningless, unintelligible inscriptions on stones. Fake alphabets have been used to create manuscripts, with the resulting inscriptions or manuscripts looking like they were written in some exotic, unknown alphabet. Hoaxers’ productions sometimes kept archaeologists or linguists busy for years trying to decipher nonsense.
Integrating Nonsense
Here we will investigate cases of combining multiple types of nonsense into a more complex unit.
Nonsense of several types can be combined into one structure. This section will draw examples from multiple types of nonsense from Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice books that Carroll wove into a unified work of literature. Similarly, as we shall see, other nonsense writers also commonly put a variety of types together into a single poem or story.
Apparently, though, readers almost never realize that such a work is composed of more than one distinct type of nonsense. That is what I observed in my courses on nonsense. People seem to have an undifferentiated experience even when several distinct types of nonsense are used in a poem.
The same students immediately realized that there were different types of nonsense in the poems once I pointed it out to them. Then it seemed so obvious to them that they wondered why they did not notice it before. Several types of nonsense can be combined in a single grammatical sentence. Consider the sentences below:
The moping shoes of logic silently screamed chibbled nanks of colorless blue rainbow food.
Droonly dreaming bread electrically chastled a married bachelor.
The sentences are fairly short grammatically correct declaratives, yet each sentence uses three different types of nonsense—categorical nonsense, self-contradiction, and near-English. Therefore, diverse types of nonsense can be integrated, even on a small scale, to function as a unit.
Nonsense of a corresponding type can be modeled on any structure of ordinary language, and nonsense occurs at every organizational level of language. There are levels of language: phonemes, syllables, words, sentences, recipes, stories, essays, plays, novels, scientific texts. Then, additionally, there are special compartments of language reserved for medicine, the law, science, and their brands of professional jargon. The complexity ranges up to the level of entire languages—French, Italian, Greek, English, and all the others. Each and every one of those elements, levels, compartments, and languages can potentially serve as a format for creating a corresponding type of nonsense.
Thus far, we have looked at three types of nonsense at the level of sentences: categorical nonsense, self-contradictions and near-English. Later, we will come back and consider some additional types of nonsense that occur primarily in sentence form. Meanwhile, this section will examine a bonanza of new types that are inherent in the multilevel structure of nonsense. We will begin with the smallest type of nonsense that exists.
Nonsense Syllables
bez
bup
dax
fip
gan
haj
jad
jeg
mof
pog
sab
nud
A nonsense syllable is a meaningless, unintelligible combination of letters formed by putting a vowel between two consonants. A nonsense syllable must not form an actual word or standard abbreviation. Hence, “cab,” “can,” and “cap” are not nonsense syllables since they are actual words. “Feb” and “aug” are not nonsense syllables since they are standard abbreviations for months of the year.