The Nature of Nonsense
[Nonsense] is not a vacuity of sense; it is a parody of sense, and that is the sense of it.
T. S. Eliot
Nonsense is spoken, written, or signed language that is unintelligible because it is meaningless. That is the primary meaning of the term as it appears in standard dictionaries. Nonsense, to be nonsense, must be language, it must be unintelligible, and it must be meaningless. All three are necessary to fit the definition.
Nonsense is, first, language. We should not be misled by the common expression “Stop your nonsense!” Saying “Stop your nonsense!” signals the speaker’s strong disapproval of another person’s nonverbal, extralinguistic behavior. Nonverbal behavior, since it is not language, is not nonsense in the dictionary meaning of the term. For example, admonishing subordinates for their nonverbal actions and extralinguistic misbehavior is only a secondary, extended use of the word nonsense.
Nonsense is, secondly, unintelligible. Saying that something is unintelligible means that it cannot be comprehended by the intellect; in other words, something that is unintelligible is beyond the reach of the intellectual or rational mind. We cannot wrap our minds around something that is unintelligible. For language to be nonsense, then, it must be unintelligible.
Sometimes people say that something is unintelligible because they personally cannot comprehend it. People who cannot speak Chinese, for example, might sometimes say that Chinese is unintelligible. By saying that, though, they are acknowledging a personal limitation: specifically, an inability to speak Chinese. Generally they know full well that Chinese is a meaningful language that is intelligible to the people who speak it.
People may sometimes talk loosely and say, for example, that the writing in an old, faded letter is unintelligible. By saying that, they would mean only that time obliterated so much of the original writing that the message cannot be recovered. Or they might mean that the writer’s penmanship is so terrible that the writing is illegible and the message unreadable. Generally, though, they would assume that there was a meaningful message in the letter when the writer originally wrote it.
Nonsense, however, is language that is unintelligible because it is, thirdly, meaningless. In other words, nonsense is language that does not make sense because the words or sentences do not fit together to convey a coherent meaning. In sum, then, nonsense is meaningless, unintelligible language.
Now, I want to make something crystal clear from the very beginning about that word meaningless. Specifically, nonsense is meaningless only in the context of its linguistic meaning, for nonsense is deeply meaningful to people in a multitude of ways. Nonsense plays important roles in children’s literature, music, psychology, religion, and the spiritual life. This book is full of instances of the rich meanings nonsense has for us in those dimensions of our lives.
Nonsense lacks linguistic meaning, to be sure, but a linguistic meaning is something we can look up in a dictionary. The other rich meanings nonsense has for us are found in our hearts and minds and souls.
Therefore, whenever I say that nonsense is meaningless, I am referring only to its lack of a linguistic dictionary meaning. Throughout this book, we will celebrate how meaningful nonsense is in our lives, while fully understanding it is devoid of linguistic meaning.
Nonsense can be deliberate or involuntary. People sometimes write or talk nonsense on purpose. They include, for example, nonsense poets or other writers who create nonsense as an art form. Those writers work deliberately and diligently to produce entertaining or aesthetically pleasing works that are meaningless and unintelligible.
People also sometimes deliberately talk nonsense for fraud or imposture. In 2014 a fake sign language interpreter stood beside President Obama on the speakers’ platform at the memorial for Nelson Mandela. As the president and other dignitaries spoke, the impostor flapped his arms and gesticulated wildly in what was supposedly sign language for the deaf, yet deaf people who watched could not make sense of what the sign language interpreter was saying. The impostor’s entire “interpretation” was meaningless nonsense.
An expert on sign language said that the impostor’s hand positions were meaningless. The expert also pointed out that the impostor did not “use facial expressions, head movements, shoulder-raising or other body language considered integral elements of signing.” Authorities were unable to determine how the fake interpreter got through security to talk nonsense next to the president of the United States.
Other times people talk nonsense involuntarily. That is, they talk nonsense without intending to; in other words, they sometimes lapse unknowingly into saying something that is meaningless and unintelligible. For example, people sometimes talk nonsense involuntarily because of a certain medical or psychological condition. Specifically, people who are psychotic, delirious, intoxicated, asleep, or having a stroke or a migraine sometimes talk unintelligible nonsense involuntarily.
People sometimes talk nonsense without intending to simply because of a conceptual confusion. That is, they unwittingly get concepts mixed up, and hence, they say something that is meaningless and unintelligible. Nonsense that comes from conceptual confusion occurs in people from all walks of life. For example, a highly successful coach once said to his team, “You guys line up alphabetically by height.”
Nonsense that results from inadvertent conceptual confusion is of particular interest to analytic philosophers. Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gilbert Ryle were among early analytic philosophers who argued that many traditional philosophical problems are meaningless, unintelligible nonsense. That was the central tenet of analytic philosophy.
Now, people who talk nonsense because of a physical or mental illness are often in a clouded state of consciousness. People who talk nonsense when they are half asleep, delirious, or crazy, for example, are not fully alert or may be only semiconscious. They may talk nonsense from within a strange dreamlike state in which they are unable to draw distinctions; in that state they cannot think logically or coherently.
In contrast, people who are working on philosophical problems are typically fully alert and in a lucid state of consciousness. Philosophical questions are difficult and tricky to begin with, though, and it is easy for even careful, logical thinkers to get confused. When their conceptual confusions are pointed out to them, they usually realize that they were talking nonsense and adjust their thinking. In contrast, delirious, intoxicated, or psychotic patients cannot comprehend that they are talking nonsense, nor can they adjust their thinking.
Nonsense can be deliberate or involuntary, and involuntary nonsense is common in hospitals, especially psychiatric hospitals. Doctors and nurses working in those settings frequently hear their patients talking nonsense involuntarily. Far more people are out and about than are working in hospitals, though, and those people are far more likely to hear or read nonsense that someone created deliberately, usually for entertainment or artistic purposes.
Nonsense is predominantly a recreational and literary form of language. The nonsense that most Americans hear or read most frequently was written for use in play, recreation, entertainment, literature, and songs. Nonsense is common in children’s oral literature, such as nursery rhymes, jump rope rhymes, and riddles. Popular children’s authors who are famous for their nonsense writings include Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss, Quentin Blake, and Shel Silverstein. Authors such as Alfred Jarry and Samuel Beckett wrote surrealistic nonsense that provoked philosophical discussion among adult readers and theater audiences. To summarize, then, nonsense is a genre of oral and written literature for children and adults.
The next chapter will give specific examples of nonsense from all of the above authors. Later we will refer to some examples of nonsense from popular forms of music, too, for nonsense is a standard ingredient of certain kinds of songs, including traditional ballads, scat singing, and doo-wop. Nonsense in entertainment, recreation, play, poetry, and song is ubiquitous in modern American society. Moreover, those are the settings in which Americans most frequently encounter nonsense, and therefore, for them, nonsense is a thoroughly pleasant experience.
Still, people hardly ever think about all of the positive nonsense that they take in as nonsense. Strangely, it never occurs to them that, for instance, lines in popular songs they like to listen to are nonsense. Although nonsense they hear and read almost always affects them positively, and they like it, they seldom think of it as nonsense. In fact, the word “nonsense” has a strongly negative effect on them.
Nonsense itself affects people positively, but the word “nonsense” affects people negatively. That is, people like nonsense itself, but they dislike the word “nonsense.” People do not associate the many good effects they enjoy from deliberate nonsense with the word “nonsense.” Instead, they associate the word “nonsense” with one common negative effect of involuntary nonsense: specifically, errors.
“Nonsense” is predominantly a pejorative term of criticism and debate. Nonsense sometimes indicates a cognitive failure. Delirious, psychotic, or intoxicated people, as already noted, talk nonsense involuntarily because they have difficulty with cognitive processing. People whose cognitive processes are fully intact may, nonetheless, talk nonsense inadvertently because of mixing incompatible concepts. For example, a football coach once said to his players, “You guys pair up in threes.”
In other words, talking nonsense without intending to is sometimes a sign of cognitive impairment due to organic illness or somebody may talk nonsense unintentionally because of misunderstanding concepts. Talking nonsense is a kind of error in both cases. Accordingly, people naturally associated talking nonsense with errors, and they then use the word “nonsense” pejoratively to denounce something somebody else said.
“Nonsense,” “unintelligible,” and “meaningless” are stock terms of criticism in serious scientific, academic, and religious debate. Saying “That is nonsense!” is an accepted way of objecting to new ideas that are put forward for rational inquiry. Objecting that an idea is unintelligible or meaningless or nonsensical is a common ploy in learned debate as well as in public discourse. In fact, the word “nonsense” occurs most frequently within the context of debate and disputation.
The following selection of quotations will illustrate how common this kind of objection is. The examples below are typical of many others that anyone could find. They are common in news magazines, newspapers, academic works, and science publications.
Squeezing light—the very idea seems nonsensical. How do you grab something as intangible as light and throttle it down to something smaller? Understanding how this is possible goes to the heart of what we now know light to be.
—Sidney Perkowitz2
People often criticize discussions of multiple universes as meaningless because we can’t detect whether they actually exist.
—Anthony Aquirre3
Infinity mathematics, to me, is something that is meaningless, because it is abstract nonsense….We have to kick the misleading word “undecidable” from the mathematical lingo since it tacitly assumes that infinity is real. We should rather replace it with the phrase “not even wrong” (in other words, utter nonsense).
—Doron Zeilberger4
Some researchers believe that by writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of better health. It may sound like self-help nonsense, but research suggests that the effects are real.
—Tara Parker-Pope5
Some people might think of “miracles” as particular juxtapositions of events, each of which has a correct and acceptable scientific explanation. This might be nonsensical, but it would be interesting to discover wherein the nonsense lies.
—Hugh McLachlan6
Evidently, dismissing somebody’s ideas as “unintelligible nonsense” is an accepted technique of raising an objection in rational debate. Objections that some proposed idea is nonsense have been raised and debated in physics, cosmology, philosophy, mathematics, religious studies, medicine, and economics. The quotations above are enough to tell us a lot about the use of “nonsense” in rational argumentation and disputation.
Ancient Greek philosophers who founded rational thought dubbed ideas “nonsense” as a way of rejecting them and setting them aside. That way of arguing against inconvenient ideas or claims is still standard practice in the pursuit of knowledge. Furthermore, objecting that an unfamiliar notion is unintelligible nonsense is treated as though it were a powerful argument. After all, if a claim is unintelligible, there is nothing there in the way of content that can be investigated by rational methods. Theoretically, then, demonstrating that somebody’s idea or position is unintelligible nonsense should put a stop to rational inquiry into the matter.
When raising this kind of objection, people use “nonsense” and “unintelligible” and “meaningless” as interchangeable terms. Yet, despite the presumed authority and finality of proving that an idea is unintelligible and nonsensical, this form of argument has a poor track record. For centuries, scoffers have greeted revolutionary new thoughts and theories by saying that they are unintelligible or nonsensical.
There are no explicit, public rules and procedures that govern accusing someone of talking nonsense or defending one’s own position against such an accusation. That is shocking, too, given that arguing that way is such a widespread, accepted practice in serious scientific, academic, and religious discussions. Why is such a startling departure from rigorous, rational standards allowed in this case?
Different individuals may disagree about whether or not a particular idea is unintelligible. One person may say that the idea is unintelligible nonsense while another person says that the idea makes perfect sense. Yet, because there are no public, agreed-upon rules governing these arguments, there is no standard, rational method for resolving disagreements about unintelligibility. We need a standard criterion for identifying unintelligible nonsense in disputed cases.
Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and Dr. Seuss worked deliberately and diligently to write meaningless, unintelligible nonsense. They and a few other authors are renowned for their literary nonsense, and their success shows that they studied the subject of unintelligible language closely. Therefore, we will select examples of deliberate nonsense to build our theory of nonsense, for we can be assured that they are bona fide instances of unintelligible nonsense.
Clear-cut, positively identified examples of deliberate nonsense would provide a standard for settling some disputes about unintelligibility. If the alleged nonsense exactly matched bona fide, standard examples of deliberate nonsense, that would definitively settle the disagreement. A curious fact about deliberate nonsense, in relation to involuntary nonsense, is germane to this potential rational method of resolving some disagreements concerning unintelligibility.
Nonsense occurs in the same patterns regardless of whether it is deliberate or involuntary. Some nonsense is produced deliberately by writers for literary or entertainment purposes or by impostors for the purpose of fraud. Some nonsense is produced involuntarily by people who are sleepy or ill or mentally disturbed. Some nonsense is produced inadvertently by cognitively intact, fully conscious people who get confused about concepts. Even so, the same structural patterns appear in nonsense whether it is produced deliberately or involuntarily. Furthermore, the same structural patterns appear in nonsense whether it is produced by an alert, conscious, creative person or by an impaired, ill, semiconscious person.
In childhood I read my favorite works of nonsense with interest and in detail. In Carl Barks’s and Lewis Carroll’s works, especially, it was obvious that there were different kinds of nonsense. I further developed my ideas about different kinds of nonsense as a graduate student, and then later as a professor of philosophy. That way, I worked out a preliminary system of nonsense types.
Afterwards, I studied medicine and became a medical doctor and psychiatrist. Throughout my studies and career in medicine and psychiatry, I paid attention when my physically ill, psychotic, cognitively impaired patients involuntarily talked or wrote nonsense. I found that my patients’ involuntary nonsense was of the same type that creative writers produced deliberately. Apparently, therefore, nonsense has its own internal logic that operates, in part, independently of particular individuals’ intentions, state of consciousness, or cognitive status.
I recognized all of the nonsense my patients talked or wrote from my studies of nonsense created deliberately by writers. However, I identified many types of deliberate nonsense in works by creative writers that I never recognized in the speech or writings of my patients. Therefore, it seems to me that creative, deliberate nonsense is fuller, richer, and more inclusive than involuntary nonsense associated with pathological states.
Nonsense is a valuable part of language that deserves serious study. Even so, some people resist the idea of rational studies of nonsense. What is the peculiar stigma that many people attach to unintelligible nonsense?
Nonsense is surrounded by several entrenched misconceptions, faulty assumptions, and half-truths. Most people have a bad attitude toward nonsense, and their bad attitude stems mostly from the strongly negative connotation of the pejorative word nonsense. People think nonsense is inherently bad and undesirable. They reflexively associate nonsense with emotions of disgust and repugnance. In their minds nonsense denotes a personal sense of displeasure and rejection. They assume that nonsense is an irredeemable, negative quantity with nothing good about it.
In reality, however, nonsense is part of the good life. Nonsense touches people’s lives most frequently in play, entertainment, literature, and song. That repugnance most people feel toward nonsense is a case of mistaken identity. In real life, as we saw, nonsense is predominantly a recreational and literary department of language—and people love it.
Nonsense seems to be almost exclusively a good thing, yet a darker, obscure, preconscious force is at work in people’s unrealistic attitude toward nonsense. Paul Davies touched on this darker irrational factor in a 2011 article in New Scientist: “The concept of a true void, apart from inducing a queasy feeling, strikes many people as preposterous or even meaningless.”
People mistakenly think that nonsense is akin to nothingness, nonexistence, chaos, and the void. At the beginning of my courses, students completed an exercise that revealed the deep irrational connection between nonsense and nothingness. I asked students to define nonsense in their own words and to state what they think nonsense is. I also asked them to introspect, then describe their inner conscious and cognitive process of defining it.
As they reflected and tried to find the right words, many reported a similar image. They pictured nonsense as an impenetrable blank wall, and behind the wall, they imagined only a shapeless and empty chaos. For them, the word nonsense evoked a yawning abyss of undifferentiated darkness.
The recurrent, ancient image of nonsense as an inchoate nothingness is a frightening archetype. Thinking of nonsense can make people feel dizzy and disoriented. Socrates described the sensation when he was trying to think his way through a thicket of puzzling philosophical concepts. He said that the prospect of “falling into a bottomless pit of nonsense” horrified him (from Plato’s Parmenides).
Most people regard nonsense as an absence of something else, namely, meaning. Few people think of nonsense as something in its own right. People think of nonsense as something sublinguistic, or as below the level of ordinary, meaningful language. In fact, that view sounds like common sense.
In reality, however, the relationship between nonsense and ordinary, meaningful language is the other way around. Nonsense is actually above the level of ordinary, meaningful language in a certain respect. Specifically, we shall see later that nonsense has a greater structural complexity than meaningful language. Therefore, nonsense is not akin to nothingness, and it is not merely the absence of meaning. Nonsense is a complex, extended form of language that operates by its own coherent inner logic. Therefore, nonsense is definitely not akin to nothingness, chaos, and the void.
Most people confuse nonsense with falsehood. That is, they do not distinguish between nonsense and falsehood. In fact, they think of nonsense as merely a particularly egregious or obnoxious form of falsehood. Nonsense is patently, blatantly a falsehood—even a falsehood with an exclamation point.
Equating nonsense with falsehood sounds like common sense, but nonsense is emphatically not the same thing as falsehood. In fact, as we shall see in Chapter 6, nonsense and falsehood belong to two separate levels of reason and analysis. Furthermore, understanding the distinction between nonsense and falsehood is necessary for effective logical thinking about some major problems of philosophy, science, and religion. Chapter 7 will discuss the critical distinctions among truth, falsehood, and nonsense.
In class, I once saw a dark mood come over a bright student the first time I mentioned nonsense. When I asked why, she explained that nonsense made her think of madness, psychosis, and severe mental illness. She related a scary childhood memory of an elderly aunt who talked incoherent nonsense during a psychotic breakdown.
Nonsense is sometimes a manifestation of mental illness. Chapter 4 will survey the role of nonsense in the life of the mind, including various psychological abnormalities. Even so, on balance, it seems that nonsense is more closely affiliated with mental health than it is with mental illness.
Most people erroneously associate nonsense with repugnance, nothingness, and falsehood, and some associate nonsense with madness. Therefore, they assume that nonsense is inherently unknowable, irrational, unfathomable, and beyond logic and reason. In other words, they think that nonsense presents an impenetrable barrier to rational thought.
A rational study of nonsense sounds like a contradiction in terms. How could there be rational knowledge about something that is meaningless and unintelligible? Discovering that an idea is unintelligible nonsense is supposedly a dead end, insofar as rational inquiry is concerned. Nothing more can or should be investigated by rational means if an idea is found to be meaningless, unintelligible, and nonsensical. As H. H. Price said, “There cannot be evidence for something which is completely unintelligible to us.”
A swirl of misconceptions, mistakes, faulty assumptions, and half-truths surrounds the important concept of nonsense. Those errors are so pervasive that people regard them as common sense. Hence, because of that, those ingrained misconceptions about nonsense constitute a hidden, collective cognitive impairment. Unexamined misconceptions about nonsense can sometimes throw off the mind, even when someone is trying hard to think logically, and that is especially so in certain frontier areas of rational inquiry. For instance, we will see later that common misconceptions about nonsense create a formidable obstacle to the rational understanding of life’s spiritual dimension.
Let us, then, give Nonsense its place among the divisions of Humor, and though we cannot reduce it to an exact science, let us acknowledge it as a fine art.
—Carolyn Wells7
It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense.
—Mark Twain8
Nonsense is a creative faculty of certain writers and artists. Normally, it goes without saying that authors want to make sense and convey a meaning to readers’ minds. That writers try to say something that is intelligible and meaningful ordinarily is so obvious that there is no reason even to state it. Therefore, writing nonsense deliberately is an art that goes against the grain; it deviates from the norm.
The writings of authors who specialized in the genre of nonsense writing are a logical place to find examples of avowed nonsense. To begin, we will consider five authors who are famous for their nonsense books, and then introduce other authors in subsequent chapters. At this point it would be nice to describe some striking characteristic or personality trait that these nonsense writers had in common. Unfortunately, there was no such common characteristic, other than that they were all males who wrote nonsense and that all of them were humorists.
John Taylor (1578–1653) ferried passengers on the Thames and also wrote volumes of nonsense poetry that he published and sold himself. Taylor, known as “The Water Poet,” was a showman and promoter of public spectacles. He once transported a huge man with a prodigious appetite from Kent to London. There, Taylor put the man on display as “The Great Eater of Kent” and charged admission to audiences who flocked to see him.
John Taylor said that “Nonsense is Rebellion.”9 Taylor had little formal education, but he was an intelligent man who saw through intellectual pretense. He realized that nonsense could be used to create an illusion of profundity and scholarship. He wrote:
Yet I with nonsense could contingerate,
With catophiscoes terragrophicate,
And make my selfe admir’d immediately
By such as understand no more then I.10
Taylor made up meaningless nonsense words for that particular verse. “Contingerate,” “catophiscoes” and “terragrophicate” are invented nonsense words that sound like those that professors or doctors might use. In other nonsense verses, Taylor used only meaningful words put together into unintelligible sentences. Here is a sample:
Oh that my Lungs could bleat like butter’d pease;
But bleating of my lungs hath caught the itch,
And are as mangy as the Irish Seas,
That doth ingender windmills on a Bitch.
I grant that Rainbowes being lull’d asleep,
Snort like a woodknife in a Ladies eyes;
Which maks her grieve to see a pudding creep
For creeping puddings only please the wise.11
Edward Lear (1812–1888) was a genial English eccentric who gained fame for his nonsense books for children. Lear’s books are selections of nonsense stories, poems, and songs. Lear was a traveling landscape artist, and he illustrated his own books with cartoons and drawings.
Lear made up funny-sounding, meaningless words like “ombliferous,” “borascible,” “mumbian,” “scroobious” and “meloobius” for his nonsense poems. Lear also often put nonsense words into otherwise intelligible letters that he wrote to his friends. Writing from Rome, for instance, he complained to a friend that
a vile beastly rottenheaded foolbegotten pernicious priggish screaming, tearing, roaring, perplexing, splitmecrackle, crachimecriggle insane ass of a woman is practicing howling below-stairs with a brute of a singing master so horribly, that my head is nearly off!12
Lear once wrote nonsense that was formatted to look like a letter. He mailed the letter to his friend Evelyn Baring as a joke. Lear wrote:
Thrippsy pillivinx,
Inky tinky pobblebockle abblesquabs?—Flosky! Beebul trimble flosky!—Okul scratchabibblebongibo, viddle squibble tog-a-tog, ferrymoyassity amsky flamsky ramsky damsky crocklefether squiggs.
Flinkywisty pomm,
Slushypipp13
Charles Dodgson (1832–1889) taught logic and mathematics at Oxford. Dodgson was shy, but as his alter ego, Lewis Carroll, he was the renowned author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Both books combine multiple forms of nonsense to bring strange, alternate worlds alive in readers’ minds. In fact, the books reflect two common English phrases that have to do with nonsense, for both “went down the rabbit hole” and “stepped through the looking-glass” denote the experience of finding oneself in nonsensical circumstances.
Much of Carroll’s nonsense is based on tricks of logic and plays on words. Carroll also incorporated ideas about certain alternate states of consciousness into his nonsense works. For instance, the Alice books feature dreams, mirror visions, and, possibly, perceptual distortions associated with hallucinogenic mushrooms. Carroll was very interested in paranormal phenomena, too.
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.”
2. Perkowitz, “Light Tricks.”
3. Lifeboat Foundation, “Advisory Board.”
4. Zeilberger, “Opinion 108.”
5. Parker-Pope, “Writing Your Way to Happiness.”
6. Novella, “New Scientist on Miracles.”
7. Wells, A Nonsense Anthology, xxxiii.
8. Twain, Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals, 303.
9. Nel, Dr. Seuss, 38.
10. Shipley, Dictionary of Early English, 173.
11. Keegan, The Penguin Book of English Verse, 322.
12. Lear, The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, xxi.
13. Lear, Queery Leary Nonsense, 6.
14. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 31.
15. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 183.
16. Morgenstern, “Disinternment,” 4.
17. From Christian Morgenstern: Lullabies, Lyrics and Gallows Songs.
18. Hobbes, Leviathan, 129.
19. Clark, Daniel Defoe, 24.
20. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 681.