Jabberwocky

A frabjous verbal medley, καλοῦ, καλή

Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking Glass (the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), created the memorable nonsense-poem Jabberwocky. It’s a dreamlike story about a fearful monster killed by a young man whose father chortles ‘Callooh! Callay!’ in joy. The student of ancient Greek is apt to recognise those words as representing καλοῦ, καλή, “of the beautiful, beautiful”, which could be taken to mean that the day belongs to the fine victor – callooh! καλοῦ (‘of the fine’) – and is “lovely” (ἠμέρα) καλή, callay!

Many of the other coinages are not so readily interpretable, and Carroll clearly wanted to make the option of plausible and wacky interpretations part of the fun. In the book, Humpty-Dumpty offers Alice a number of suggestions which the reader is hardly inclined to credit, such as the notion that ‘wabe’ means ‘the grass-plot round a sun-dial…because it goes a long way before it and a long way behind it, and a long way beyond it on each side’. Boom-boom!

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

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
      The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
      The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
      Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
      And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
      The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
      And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
      He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
      Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
      He chortled in his joy.

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

Carroll himself had some suggestions about how to pronounce the words (I always add an r into ‘borog<r>oves’, sorry), but they don’t necessarily guide us to what he thought they might mean. He said that ‘gyre’ should be pronounced with a hard g (as ‘gyroscope’ was in his day), and has Humpty-Dumpty say that ‘gimble’ means ‘to make holes like a gimlet’ (p. 199 of the Complete Illustrated Edition) - also a word that begins with a hard g.

If ‘gyre’ is taken to mean ‘whirl around’, then ‘gimble’ might suggest (as it always has to me) a combination of ‘gambol’ and ‘nimble’. One can relish every coinage like this, but I recently came across the word ‘gimbal’ and wondered if Carroll’s conception of ‘gimble’ might be, consciously or otherwise, connected to it.

‘Gimbal’ is an English word with a fascinating origin. It derives from French ‘gemel’, twin (from Latin geminus, gemellus). It is attested in English from the early 16th century to mean a “twin-hinged mechanism” that allows an object to move in two different planes, such as a ship’s compass:

If one were thinking of gyroscopes, one might surely also think of gimbals. And ‘gyre and gimble in the wabe’ sounds like bits of a ship tossing and turning in the waves. So whatever mischievous misdirection Carroll creates, it wouldn’t be out of the question to think that the slithy (i.e. writhing, slimy) creatures called ‘toves’ are to be thought of as marine animals doing an acrobatic turn in the water.