Revile might be too strong word.
No.
It's not.
It's probably imprecise, though. There is some literature, however, which causes me mental and physical agony. Reading it is like the metaphorical fingernails on chalkboard. My nerves tense, my ears close, my face contorts, and I feel like ice water is dropping down my spine.
I'm not talking about pulp romances or mass market westerns or out-of-the-box dungeons-and-dragons fantasy novels.
No, no.
I'm talking about this:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe
And also a bit of this:
He never will know if the Gick or the Goor
fits into the Skrux or the Snux or the Snoor.
I feel like a traitor to the English speaking world. I feel as if I am turning my back on childhood itself. I feel like I am thumbing my nose at Wonder with a capital a W and Imagination with a capital I. Nevertheless, words mean things, and empty words are a paradox my spirit cannot manage. Nonsense poetry (like the above snippets from Lewis Carroll's "The Jabberwocky" and Dr. Seuss's Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?) gives me fits.
It's all Vogon poetry to my ear.
Oh freddled gruntbuggl
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee
And we all know that Vogon poetry is widely recognized as the third worst poetry in the Universe.
It's a real hang-up. I recognize that it's personal, and I wage no campaign to burn all such books or to ban them from schools and libraries. It being a personal reaction doesn't make it any less real, though.
There's a real difference, two between nonsense and absurdity or surrealism. I can handle distorted reality. I can handle the shocking, impossible juxtaposition of incompatible realities. Nonsense, however, is another matter altogether. A word without meaning has no reality -- and, yet, there it is. This breaks my brain and gives me the creepy-crawlers. In fact, nonsense poetry gives me the same sense of moral indignation as riddles (which are linguistic cheats) and the same reaction of, "Did you really run out of words in our vast collection of world language?" as scat singing. But even if I set those feelings aside, I cannot wrap my mind around the use of words that are not words at all.
Isn't that just Smurftastic?
.Nevets.
I concur.
ReplyDeleteI share your pain. >_<
ReplyDeleteI can't say I share your pain- but i do understand where you are coming from. It's hard to get involved in a piece with so many made up words, kids however find them super fun. I rather love the Lewis Carol poem, perhaps because I'm a fan in general, but also because English has a great deal of words already and the authors or other people who make up new ones are breakers outside of the normal box.
ReplyDeleteI understand! Although I have never been a Dr. Suess fan, we do have an entire Doozzer vocabulary and conversations. Doozzer knows when Brian says he is going to "bust him in his bahoobles" that he has gotten away with something that should have been disciplined. BUT, the three of us are the only ones who need to partake in the privacy of our own home (and maybe a brief blog quip). On the other hand, I do agree that it can be appropriate in encouraging creativity in children's lit. I was just one of those kids that did not get the symbolism at that age and preferred a realistic story.
ReplyDeleteSorry Love, I will forever love that poem. Mostly because the nonsense words made it easy for my brother to come up with nonsensical memory tricks to help me remember them when I had to memorize it to recite before my 8th Grade Literature class. :-) Imagining a Vorpal blade (I think I always pictured a vortex) eating up a snicker-snack sized monster (naturally with a creamy nougat center) made it so much easier to remember!!
ReplyDeleteExcept that without that ridiculous poem, we would not have the word "chortle" in our vocabulary today, which is a word that cannot be replaced by anything else in the Thesaurus. Seriously. Chortle is the best.
ReplyDeleteAs a fantasy writer, I guess I love the idea of made up words, as long as there is no equivalent. A well-picked word evokes feelings based on the phonemes that make it up--"chortle" is a harsh word, but funny, and evokes the image of what it is much better than "chuckle" or "laugh." However, I favor the occasional use of words like these (or occasional creation of them) as opposed to a poem that completely consists of them--that loses meaning, as you point out.
Oh come on Nevete! Jabberwocky gave us words like " chortle" and while it is superficially nonsense, I understand every word. But maybe that says more about me than the author...
ReplyDelete@Bru - Whew! I feel less entirely like an outcast.
ReplyDelete@Misha - Thanks for the support from another continent!
@Summer - When I was a kid, I found poems filled with nonsense words absolutely boring.
@Amy - haha Fair enough, but I also think a private language is a whole other thing than actual nonsense. If it has meaning, it's not nonsense.
@Rose - If the poem didn't exist, you wouldn't need mnemonics to remember it. ;)
@Kiersi - I am all for the creation of new words when the need arises, but when you create a word because there's not one that means what you need it to, you're not dealing with nonsense, just with new words.
@Frances - Your brain is more agile than mine then. lol