Saturday Rave: Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.

The gorgeous and strangely stirring nonsense that is the poem Jabberwocky is usually associated with Through The Looking Glass And What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll's sequel to Alice in Wonderland.

But the first verse of the poem was written some years before Looking Glass's publication, for Mischmasch, a magazine Carroll wrote for the amusement of his family and friends.

He titled it A stanza of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and to make this claim marginally more convincing he wrote the word the with a y and a small e.

Twas bryllig and ye slythy toves
Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe:
All mimsy were ye borogoves;
And ye mome raths outgrabe.

'It seems very pretty,' says Alice, when she's heard it, 'but it's rather hard to understand!'

Well, of course it is. Let's take just one word, raths. Humpty Dumpty says a rath is a sort of green pig (but then Humpty says that words mean what he says they mean). Carroll himself says a rath is a species of badger with smooth white hair, long hind legs and horns like a stag, that lives chiefly on cheese - except that later he changed his mind and he said it was a kind of land turtle that lives on swallows and oysters.

If there is anything to be learned from this, it is that nonsense is tremendously liberating - and in fact I'm tempted to start a new lifestyle cult which involves repeating meaningless phrases while adopting unnatural poses.

Hang on, though: that's been done rather a lot already, hasn't it...

...but I suppose if I claim it'll also help people to lose weight...

...oh good grief. I'm terribly afraid that might even work...

Word To Use Today: one that means nothing at all. See if anyone notices!