Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” is perhaps the best-known literary nonsense poem in English. Legions of admirers know the poem by heart, and the meaningless words he invented for the poem have become famous in their own right. The poem begins and ends with this verse:
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.14
“Jabberwocky” spawned throngs of earnest interpreters with contending theories about supposed hidden meanings of the poem. The Lewis Carroll Society, dedicated to the study of Carroll and his works, has been active continuously since 1969. Paradoxically, then, “Jabberwocky” is no longer a good example of nonsense to use in formulating a sound theory of meaningless, unintelligible language. “Jabberwocky” carries too much baggage in the form of clashing interpretations and controversial theories. For that reason, we will leave “Jabberwocky” aside and instead consider some of Carroll’s other nonsense. Specifically, he wrote fascinating nonsense based on pronouns, conjunctions, figures of speech, and abstract ideas, such as time.
Carroll wrote some lengthy nonsense modeled on complex procedures, such as trials. The final two chapters of Alice in Wonderland recount an entire nonsensical trial. The king, serving as judge, begins the trial by ordering the herald to read the accusation. Then the king immediately orders the jury to consider their verdict. The main evidence presented consists of six stanzas of unintelligible nonsense verses such as:
I gave her one, they gave him two,
You gave us three or more;
They all returned from him to you,
Though they were mine before.15
Then, at the end of the trial, the queen demands, “Sentence first—verdict afterward.” The trial is made up of nonsensical versions of actual elements of court procedure, yet the many individual unintelligible bits nevertheless combine to create a vivid, coherent mental experience of a strange trial.
Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914) was a gifted German poet whose life was cut short by World War I. Morgenstern had a special talent for humorous, whimsical nonsense poetry with a surrealistic bent. In 1969, on my first visit to Germany, I asked many of the people I met about Christian Morgenstern. Incredibly, practically everyone could recite his most famous poem, “Distinterment.”
Once there was a picket fence
of interstitial excellence.
An architect much liked its look;—
protected by the dark he took
the interspaces from the slats
and built a set of modern flats.
The fence looked nothing as it should,
since nothing twixt its pickets stood,
This artefact soon fated it,
the senate confiscated it,
and marked the architect to go
to Arctic—or Antarctico.16
The nonsense poem above was translated from Morgenstern’s original German, yet it tells the same meaningless, unintelligible story. Upon reflection, though, the idea of translating nonsense poems from one language into another language may seem paradoxical. Translation, supposedly, is creating a new text in one language that has the same meaning as an original text in another language. However, nonsense is meaningless, or devoid of meaning. How, then, could nonsense be translated?
We can accept the paradox, though. In fact, some kinds of nonsense can be translated from one language into other languages, while other kinds of nonsense cannot be translated. Some nonsense does not even need to be translated because it looks the same to people who speak any language. The following nonsense poem by Morgenstern is an illuminating example:
Laloo Laloo Laloo Laloola
Kroklokwoffzie? Seemimeemi?
Siyokronto-pruflipio:
Biftsi baftsi; hulaleemi:
quasti basti bo.
Laloo laloo laloo laloola!
Hontarooroo miromenty
zaskoo zes roo roo?
Entypenty, liyolenty
cleckwapuffsie lue?
Laloo laloo laloo laloola!17
Theodore Geisel (1904–1991) is better known as Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss wrote children’s books of nonsense poems and stories, which he illustrated with cartoon drawings. Americans tend to identify Dr. Seuss with children’s nonsense literature. He was a popular public figure during his lifetime and was honored posthumously on a United States postage stamp. His cartoon characters Horton the Elephant and the Cat in the Hat are recognized, popular symbols or icons of nonsense for children.
Dr. Seuss had an offbeat sense of humor, and he liked to make nonsensical remarks. He once told a group of children that he was trying to invent a boomerang that would not come back. On his deathbed, he looked up at his wife, smiled, and asked, “Am I dead yet?”
In his Sleep Book, Dr. Seuss invented a nonsensical sport—sleep talking. In sports, players try to win, and that implies that they are participating consciously. In contrast, people who talk in their sleep are not conscious, and their speech is involuntary. Sleep talking is a sport in Dr. Seuss’s nonsense world, though. The world champions are two brothers, Jo and Mo Redd-Zoff, who for fifty-five years have spent their nights “talking their heads off.” In that time, the brothers have “talked about laws and they’ve talked about gauze. They’ve talked about paws and they’ve talked about flaws. They’ve talked quite a lot about old Santa Claus.”
Dr. Seuss’s list of things the brothers talked about in their sleep consists of unintelligible pairings of unrelated objects joined by the conjunction “and.” The incoherence of the list reflects the incoherence of the idea of making a sport of talking in one’s sleep. In subsequent contexts, we will find other examples of nonsense that use conjunctions unintelligibly.
Dr. Seuss created plenty of other kinds of nonsense, too, including surprisingly nonsensical curses. Some authorities maintained that curses are inherently meaningless. Apropos, Thomas Hobbes said that “Cursing, Swearing, Reviling, and the like, do not signify as Speech, but as the actions of a tongue accustomed.”18 Daniel Defoe stated that swearing “makes a man’s Conversation unpleasant, his Discourse fruitless, and his Language Nonsense.”19 Similarly, H. W. Fowler observed that “When we say damn, it relieves us because it is a strong word & yet means nothing.”20
Since curses are meaningless in the first place, then how could anybody create a nonsensical version of a curse? In the abstract, it doesn’t seem conceivable, yet Dr. Seuss created nonsense curses in his comic strip Hejji (1935). Hejji was a boy who lived in a mountainous, seemingly Middle Eastern kingdom ruled by the Mighty One. Hejji and the Mighty One
uttered colorful, nonsensical swear words that unintelligibly mixed words for body parts with names of astronomical objects. They would swear, for example, “by the wrist of the sun,” “by the thumbs of the comet,” and “by the tonsils of the Great North Star.”