Nonsense is often humorous: “I am nude under my clothes.” The words certainly command attention, and they create a vivid image in the mind, yet the intellect strives in vain to put them together as a meaningful sentence. In other words, the sentence is unintelligible, and that is part of what makes it funny. Anyone who studies the subject soon realizes that there is a strong connection between nonsense and humorous laughter.
Nonsense promotes social bonding. A few nonsensical playground rhymes like the one below have been transmitted virtually unchanged for well over a century. They are a form of oral literature, passed along only by word of mouth from child to child.
One bright day in the middle of the night
Two dead boys got up to fight
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other.
A blind man came to see the fray.
A dumb man came to shout “hooray!”
A deaf policeman heard the noise
And came and killed those two dead boys.
Children chant those playground rhymes together, often while tossing a ball around among themselves in a circle. This way of integrating nonsense chanting with physical activity can forge enduring social bonds. Many adults can still recite these nonsense rhymes and have fond childhood memories of chanting them with their friends.
My friend Madeleine Diemer, a psychotherapist, also has warm childhood memories of reciting nonsense with other people to cement a bond with them. Madeline would recite nonsense with her family members. They said these words together each night when they finished eating dinner: “I’ve had an excellent sufficiency, and more would be prodotony to my apathetic quantity, which is quite quadilified.” Since then I have learned of several instances of this among my friends and acquaintances.
Hence, I surmise that the practice of talking nonsense together as a family after dinner must be a more common ritual than I would have imagined. Furthermore, the people who shared these memories with me obviously looked back on their experiences with nostalgic tenderness. Thinking about the nonsense they would recite seemed to stir up their feelings about their family members.
Apparently, group recitations of nonsense are sometimes an effective means of creating social bonds among people. How this works is not clear, but it is an interesting effect and bears further investigation. Later we will discover more about the use of nonsense to unify people and get them to cooperate with each other.
Nonsense heard from others sometimes prompts people to talk nonsense involuntarily in response. When my children were only three or four years old, they would talk nonsense back to me when I talked nonsense to them. This and other observations lead me to believe that nonsense breeds nonsense. That is, talking nonsense seems to predispose people to respond with nonsense. This happens automatically, without any conscious intention on their part. I could recount about a dozen cases of this effect, of which the following two cases are representative.
I once read this sentence to my assistant:
The slozy begoners floofed in tarkly from below in their cluddering, plaggering flootiedopters.
The sentence astonished and energized her. She became somewhat agitated and spoke rapidly. She launched into an excited attempt to explain away the sentence. It seemed particularly unsettling to her that flootiedopters would floof in from below. Her explanation quickly ran aground and trailed off into incoherent, unintelligible nonsense.
In another example, my brother and I once stayed up talking most of the night. In the early morning hours, I read him Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” and Algernon C. Swinburne’s “Nephelidia.” The nonsense had an astonishing, delayed effect on him. Over the next few days, nonsense would insert itself, uninvited, into his conversations. He said, “For a couple of days afterwards, nonsense was at the front of my mind. Something that wasn’t even a real word would enter my mind and fly out of my mouth before I knew what was happening. It was as though I had no control over what I said. Nonsense words would come out in my dreams, too.”
What is it about nonsense that seems to inspire nonsense in others? What might we learn about human psychology by investigating this “rebound effect” more carefully and looking at the hidden, powerful qualities of unintelligible speech?
Nonsense sometimes emerges when the mind is attempting to escape from a severe stressor. Severe overwhelming stress makes people talk incoherent nonsense. G. K. Chesterton once said it was the “idea of escape” that is “the idea that lies at the back of all nonsense.” Soldiers rescued from horrendous combat situations sometimes could only talk in garbled nonsense afterward. Although they survived uninjured, the soldiers had faced imminent death. The psychological trauma had left them unable to put words together into intelligible sentences.
I observed this phenomenon a few times myself when working as a physician in emergency rooms. Sometimes survivors of horrific accidents would talk incoherent nonsense after they had been brought in from the scene. Though they had not been hurt in the accident, overwhelming stress disrupted their mental processes that organized meaningful speech.
On April 16, 2007, a disturbed gunman shot and killed 32 students and professors at Virginia Tech University. The killer trapped thirty of his victims in a campus building and shot them in the classrooms at point-blank range. Other students survived by jumping to safety from windows on the second floor. One student who escaped telephoned his mother immediately afterwards to assure her that he was safe. She reported that initially he was incoherent when he spoke to her. At first, she said, “I couldn’t understand him. It was like gibberish.”46
Nonsense is inseparably connected with sleeping and dreaming. Hypnagogia is a transitional state of consciousness people experience as they drift from wakefulness to sleep. Many people perceive surrealistic, iridescently colorful mental imagery during the hypnagogic phase of consciousness. Many also experience strange nonsense words and phrases running through their minds.
I have written down my own hypnagogic nonsense since graduate school. I have heard disconnected nonsense phrases such as “fine of apple bijani,” “two nose of harsh cumple,” “obal summus,” and “drish the awesome closerfose.” Experts on hypnagogic phenomena recognize this kind of nonsense as a common manifestation of the process of going to sleep.
In the superb book Hypnagogia, Andreas Mavromatis quotes dozens of similar examples of hypnagogic nonsense from various sources, including:
Lacertina Wain
They are exposed to verbally intellection.
He is as good as cake double.
A leading clerk is a great thing in my profession, as well as a Sabine footertootro.
To the sidewalk with Tell too.
Conceit is not often being named a phantabilit.
A Burul house Schillinger to cook plate.
Amaranda es tifiercia.