Wordplay

Last night as I was going to sleep, quite without me being able to do anything about it, the poem written by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass about the Jabberwock came to mind. I found myself straining to remember what the poem was, and for some reason I could remember the whole first stanza, and then some:

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Do you do strange things with your brain like that? So of course, this morning I googled "jabberwocky" and have been on quite a strange journey ever since. According to Wikipedia, this poem made of nonsense and portmanteau words is considered to be one of the greatest nonsense poems ever written in the English language. In fact, two of the words he came up with have entered the language: chortle and galumph.

And of course I was fascinated by the definition of portmanteau. It is exactly what the name of my blog is, after all: a combination of my name (DJan) with the "ity" word of your choice. I actually think of it being "insanity" but it could also be "sanity" or some other word I haven't thought of yet. Some well-known examples of portmanteau words are "wordplay" (the name of this post), "chocoholic" and "wikipedia," to name a few. Each of the links takes you to the Wikipedia description, which I found to be quite entertaining.

I also remembered the whole Humpty Dumpty conversation, once I got started with this line of thought, that Alice had with Humpty. Do you remember? He discusses semantics and pragmatics with Alice. Their conversation has been used to justify lines of thought in more than 250 legal cases, two of them before the Supreme Court. This link will take you to the conversation, if you have the interest.

Language is so much fun! And to find out how completely taken I was with Lewis Carroll's book, I discovered during my journey this morning that I had already made a post way back in March about another character in the Looking Glass: The Walrus. In re-reading the post all these months later, I found that it was another time that I was just beginning to fall into sleep that I thought of that poem.

I suppose this means it's time for me to re-read Through the Looking Glass, don't you think? For those who are interested in the entire poem, the first link in this post will take you there. I thought about putting it in here, but I find the posts I enjoy the most are not terribly long and leave the details to the reader to explore further.