Meaningless Word Strings
By eliminating syntax, we can string meaningful words together into unintelligible sequences, then punctuate the resulting incoherent processions of words to look like sentences. Such meaningless, unintelligible word strings are devoid of grammatical order, so they do not convey coherent thoughts to the mind.
Normally, when we speak or write, the mind automatically puts words together into proper grammatical arrangement. Hence, meaningless word strings are a difficult type of nonsense to compose. The process taxes the mind because grammatical order seems to keep inserting itself unbidden. Many of my students reported that writing meaningless word strings was a vexatious, frustrating experience for them, yet they also said that it was interesting and informative. The process made them aware of the complex automatic mental processes that underlie ordinary speech.
exercise
Meaningless Word Strings
Green it thankful swings if how zest.
Money transcendence any explodes hooray category if.
1. Write an original meaningless word string.
b. Introspect, then record your feelings and impressions about the mental process of writing a meaningless word string.
Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Dr. Seuss all used types of nonsense that are based on specific parts of speech. First we will look at a type of nonsense that plays tricks with conjunctions; then we will examine a type that uses pronouns unintelligibly.
Conjunctive Nonsense
Conjunctions are words used to connect words, phrases, clauses, or sentences. “And,” “or,” “but,” and “because” are conjunctions.
Normally, context makes it clear how the things joined by a conjunction are supposed to be related. Hence, it is easy to comprehend the sentence “My dog and cat fight every day.” Nor would anyone have any trouble comprehending a sentence like “My Uncle Hamperd ate fish and chips and bacon and eggs and bread and butter and had pie and ice cream for dessert.”
However, Lear’s and Carroll’s nonsense verses use conjunctions that have no intelligible relationship to each other. The mind draws a blank when trying to figure out how rainbows and knives or muscles and hives, or hurdles and mumps or poodles and pumps, could possibly be related. Similarly, putting shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages, and kings together without providing a unifying context makes no sense. The mind is unable to establish any meaningful linkages among such wildly disparate items such as “forks and hope” and “smiles and soap.”24
Non-junctive nonsense is unintelligible because it uses conjunctions to put things together that have no business being put together that way. It is a common technique of nonsense writers. In fact, it helps structure the most familiar nonsense verse in English. In the nursery rhyme that follows, no context is provided that enables us to see how the cat and the fiddle are supposed to be connected. Nor can we figure out what the little dog’s laughing has to do with the dish and the spoon running away together:
Hey diddle diddle
The cat and the fiddle
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed to see such sport
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
Nonreferential Pronouns
They told me you had been to her
And mentioned me to him.
She gave me a good character.
But said I could not swim.
He sent them word I had not gone,
(We know it to be true)
If she should push the matter on
What would become of you?
…
If I or she should chance to be
Involved in this affair,
He trusts to you to see them free
Exactly as we were.
My notion was that you had been
(Before she had this fit)
An obstacle that came between
Him, and ourselves, and it.
Don’t let him know she liked them best,
For this must ever be
A secret kept from all the rest,
Between yourself and me.25
Nothing whatsoever in the verbal or situational context of Carroll’s poem tells us who or what “they,” “he,” “she,” “it,” “you,” or “I” are supposed to be. Consequently, the sentences, though grammatically correct, run on and on without making a point. A mild confusion or disoriented state sets in, and the reader’s mind floats free.
Uncle Hamperd and Aunt Florene went downtown and bought a dozen doughnuts and they brought the doughnuts home. He ate ten of the doughnuts, she ate one, and they had one left. So, they divided it in half, but he ate both halves.
This story makes sense because the referents of the pronouns are clearly identified. However, Carroll’s verses above are nonsense because there is no way of telling what the pronouns supposedly denote. This particular technique of nonsense writing is hard to master. Participants in my courses and workshops experienced little trouble writing near-English nonsense, categorical nonsense, and numerous other types; in fact, they found it interesting and enjoyable. However, they experienced considerable difficulty writing nonreferential pronouns. They described the process as frustrating and mind-numbing.
Numerative Nonsense
Numerative nonsense is meaningless, unintelligible language that is modeled on number terminology. This particular type of nonsense is difficult to classify, for numerative nonsense occurs in several distinct kinds. The same problem also arises with some other types of nonsense, though. Therefore, we need to add another precept to our system of classifications.
Nonsense of one type may occur in multiple distinct subtypes. Numerative nonsense is found in at least four distinct subtypes. First, actual numbers can be put into a context in which there is no possibility of determining what they are supposed to enumerate. The number words just dangle in a void. Lewis Carroll produced interesting examples of this type of nonsense; consider the verse below:
I gave her one, they gave him two,
You gave us three or more.26
This sentence invites the question of what “one,” “two,” or “three” is referencing. Nothing in the verbal or situational context enables us to answer that question. So, here, the words “one,” “two” and “three” do not enumerate anything.
Similarly, in Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen invites Alice to a banquet. When she arrives, the guests sing a song, purportedly to greet her. The chorus of the song runs, “And welcome Queen Alice with thirty-times-three,” and then, “And welcome Queen Alice with ninety-times-nine.”27 The trouble is nothing enables us to answer the questions “thirty-times-three what?” or “ninety-times-nine what?” And so Alice is left wondering what those numbers are supposed to enumerate.