2008-01-31
Interesting Poetry – Jabberwocky
Well, I didn’t want to leave you guys with nothing, so here’s a quick poetry post. Jabberwocky from Lewis Carrol’s “Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There”. If you’ve seen Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, you’ll probably recognize the part I’ve quoted.
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
To confirm your suspicions, it was intended to be gibberish. However, portions of it, such as the word “vorpal” are slowly becoming meaningful. On a related note, if you’ve ever seen “Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail”, some people (myself included) like to refer to the killer rabbit as a “vorpal bunny”.
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Sean Duggan said,
2008-07-04 at 9:32
Specifically, it was supposed to sound like very convincing Old English gibberish. If I recall correctly, his plan was to submit it to one of the academic journals that tracked such things to see if they’d be taken in by it. I’m not certain if he actually did do that. One of the things which always bugged me is that people quote “chortled” as being a word Carrol invented for the poem which has since become part of the language, but the actual word used was “chorted”. I’d be more inclined to include “vorpal” as the word which actually migrated in, but then again, I grew up on D&D where a vorpal sword was a standard magic item.