Download Stubbs Sarah Stubbs Dr. Lanzendorfer The English Language 5

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Sarah Stubbs
Dr. Lanzendorfer
The English Language
5 December 2014
Nonsense in the English Language
There is one outstanding similarity that exists among the most beloved literature we read
to our children as they are learning to read and speak, the books young elementary and middle
school children delve into, and the works high school and college students study and even read
for pleasure: nonsense. Some of the most famous authors known to be inventive and nonsensical
were Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss, and J.K. Rowling. Gryffindor and Grinch did not
exist in the English language until they were written in English literature. Nonsensical or madeup words, when used in a matter where they are set in with Standard English function words,
enrich language and give language artistic value. Sometimes these words become adapted into
the language for everyday use and sometimes their purpose is merely for the fantasy world they
were created in to spark the imaginations of readers young and old. This essay will explore how
meaning is derived from nonsense words and why nonsense words have merit and are important
to language—and have been ever since the Inkhorn Controversy.
Jodi Lamm argues in her article “Making Phonological Sense out of Nonsense Poetry”
that “Poets like Carroll, Seuss, and others have defined the genre of Nonsense Poetry by making
an art out of combining neologisms with poetic form, and giving their readers a sense that they
know what is happening in a poem without having any idea what these new words mean alone,”
(1). According the Merriam Webster, a neologism is a new word, usage, or expression.
Essentially what Lamm means is that through careful placement of made-up words (or
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neologisms), readers can use their context clues and knowledge of lexical categories to get an
idea about what is being written without ever have seeing certain words before. Lamm further
puts deciphering meaning from these neologisms aside and focuses on whether or not writers
who use nonsense words adhere to “English and human universal segment constraints and how
they conform to English syllable structure,” (1). Lamm focuses on the phonology of nonsense
words and comes to the conclusion that when authors create words that comply with the
phonology of Standard English, meaning can begin to be obtained.
Through tagging for syntactic content and considering the phonology of nonsense words,
nonsense poems and sonnets written by English-speaking authors begin to have merit. The first
and probably the most famous example of nonsense is Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” a poem
Alice finds in Through the Looking Glass. After reading the poem, Alice finds herself feeling
somewhat confused about its meaning. She says that “SOMEBODY killed SOMETHING: that’s
clear, at any rate—,” (Carroll). A quick read-through by any literate, English-speaking person
would see immediately that the poem contains a high number of words that are complete
nonsense. Even though the reader has most likely never seen these words before, a mental image
of various creatures begins to form in the reader’s head. The scene is set in the tugley wood that
is as rustic, unique, and endless like Wonderland is described to be. The tugley wood is home to
these creatures the reader begins to imagine: the Jubjub bird, the borogoves and raths. However,
the creature to be feared the most is the Jabberwock, according the father whom is speaking to
his son. The Jabberwock has horrid claws and jaws (5-6). At the end of the poem, the son kills
the Jabberwock and the father rejoices (21-24). The reason the reader can paint this picture and
come to these conclusions is because the nonsense words that Carroll uses are placed
strategically in his poem among function words.
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Carroll’s nonsense seems to make sense ultimately because his sentences are correct
syntactically. Carroll’s nonsense words throughout the “Jabberwocky” are all either nouns,
adjectives, or verbs. For example, the fourth stanza in the poem reads
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came! (13-16).
Of the 24 words in this stanza, four are nonsense or would be considered nonsense at the time
Carroll wrote Through the Looking Glass in 1871. Uffish is used as an adjective, Jabberwock a
noun, tulgey another adjective, and burbled a verb. Of the 24 words, 13 are function words.
Function words include prepositions, determiners, articles, pronouns, and conjunctions
(Mihalicek and Wilson 153). Function words are the foundation of any language and they link
the content words together to ultimately create semantic meaning. For this reason, the reader can
begin to pinpoint meaning to neologisms because he or she can understand the context of the
neologism. Uffish is describing the specific thoughts of the boy who is resting near the Tumtum
tree, attentive and ready for the Jabberwock to appear (11-13).
Phonologically, Carroll’s words make sense. By using the method Lamm did in her
research and referencing the International Phonetic Alphabet, Carroll’s nonsense can be read
aloud like Standard English words. Using uffish as an example again, it’s blatant that the sounds
in this word are sounds that are common within other utterances in English. The uff- is
understood to make the same sound that occurs at the end of the word stuff and -ish is understood
to make same sound that occurs at the end of the English word fish. Since literate, Englishspeaking humans can physically produce these sounds simply because they are common
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phonological utterances, Carroll’s nonsense words begin to have meaning because they feel and
sound like they could realistically exist in the English language.
Perhaps the most popular poet and author in the realm of nonsense would be Dr. Seuss.
In Dr. Seuss’s book he wrote to help children learn the alphabet, Dr. Seuss’s ABC, neologisms
are extremely prevalent. Instances of nonsense in this children’s novel consist of: fiffer-fefferfeff, Icabod, kerchoo, tuttle-tuttle, and Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz. For the most part, the average literate,
English-speaking person can tell by reading Dr. Seuss’s ABC that most of Seuss’s made-up
words, in this book in particular, are either nouns or adjectives, much like Carroll’s are in
“Jabberwocky.”
Even though the lexical categories of the nonsense words are similar between the two
authors, meaning is deciphered in two completely separate ways. In “Jabberwocky,” the reader
deciphers what an “uffish thought” could be through the use of context clues and it’s placement
in the text among function words. In Dr. Seuss’s ABC, the reader uses context clues in a
different way: recognizing rhymes, assonance, and consonance. Since the purpose of the text is
to help children learn their ABCs, Dr. Seuss isn’t relying on function words to allow the reader
to decipher meaning of the nonsense. Deriving any meaning becomes more heavily reliant upon
phonology. The reader can imagine that a Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz is some sort of animal or creature
because of its context:
Big Z
Little z
What begins with Z?
I do.
I am a Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz
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As you can plainly see.
Aside from the facts that the context clearly proves that Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz is a creature and the
narrator, and that this is an illustrated children’s book, Dr. Seuss is still reliant upon phonology
for the neologism to have any merit. Phonologically, the words make sense. The Zi- in Zizzer is
the same sound made in the Standard English word zipper, the –izz- the same sound as is, and –
er the same sound in her. By recognizing the particular lexical categories Dr. Seuss’s made-up
words belong to and testing to see if the neologisms are correct phonologically, Seuss’s
nonsense, much like Carroll’s, begins to make some sense.
Since most of Dr. Seuss’s works were intended for audiences of children who have not
yet learned to read or are in the earlier processes of learning to read, it struck me on the surface
as counterproductive to use nonsense words in a book for beginner readers. If these children
have not yet learned some of the more basic, common, everyday Standard English words, why
would adults want to confuse them with words that do not technically exist? Upon linguistic
contemplation, it can be argued that since Dr. Seuss’s nonsense words, like Carroll’s, make sense
phonologically, that they are helping children learn to associate sounds with letters and letter
combinations. In addition to helping kiddos sound out big words, the nonsense makes reading
fun, which has merit in itself. If children find these nonsense words fun, silly, or entertaining,
they will continue to read and have a genuine desire to do so.
Aside from encouraging children to be creative, inventive, and imaginative while
teaching them how to read, nonsense words more importantly have merit because oftentimes
they are adopted into the standard language, thus enriching it. Enter the Inkhorn Controversy.
Nonsense words would not have had any merit if it weren’t for what Melvin Bragg calls the
“first and greatest formal dispute about the English language” to ever happen: the Inkhorn
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Controversy (116). As English was developing in the 1500s, some scholars began to have an
identity crisis about the English language. The debate was about whether or not new words
deriving from Latin and other languages should be added to English (116). Since it’s obvious
that since then hundreds of thousands of words have been added to the English language, the
people of that time recognized the value in variety. The settling of this controversy ultimately
allowed Shakespeare and others after him to write richly and beautifully. Any word—whether it
initially is viewed as nonsense or not—that is adopted into a language is adding nuances to that
language, thus enriching it. A larger vocabulary means countless combinations. A language that
is nuanced is a language that is beautiful and valuable to writers and communicators and those
that interpret their messages.
The analysis section of this paper focuses mostly on nonsense written by Carroll and Dr.
Seuss. However, there is one author who was a direct result of the Inkhorn Controversy and has
immensely contributed to the development and enrichment of the English Language:
Shakespeare. According to Shakespeare Online, Shakespeare is responsible for nearly 1,700
commonly known modern Standard English words. Some of the words appearing on this list
include: advertising, eyeball, unreal, laughable, elbow, and gossip (Mabillard). Bragg writes in
The Adventure of English that Shakespeare had a vocabulary of more than 21,000 different
words (134). Bragg states, “The average educated man today, more than four hundred years on
from Shakespeare with the advantage of the hundreds of thousands of new words that have come
in since his time, has a working vocabulary of less than half of Shakespeare,” (135). When
Shakespeare was writing these words that did not exist, weren’t they technically nonsense?
Wouldn’t his audiences have had to use visuals, context clues, and phonetics to decipher what he
meant by unreal if they had never heard that word before in their entire lives? If it weren’t for
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the Inkhorn Controversy, Shakespeare’s nonsense might not have had the great impact it had on
the English language, let alone the nonsense created by authors that came after him like Dr.
Seuss, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, and even J.K. Rowling. If it weren’t for the Inkhorn
Controversy laying the groundwork for variety and nuances in language, English may have never
gotten to the point to where works like Dr. Seuss’s ABC and “Jabberwocky” would ever have
any merit.
Through careful recognition of lexical categories within a text that uses neologisms, and
the application of phonology, nonsense words begin to make sense. Readers—young and old—
can begin to imagine a Jabberwocky or a Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz by simply recognizing the
framework it is set in: Standard English function words. By analyzing these nonsense texts, and
noting the colossal impact Shakespeare has had in developing the English language after the
Inkhorn Controversy of the 1500s, I began to ask myself, what is a nonsense word in today’s
digital era? News of new words makes headlines every year. I remember reading about when
bootylicious was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Not to mention, selfie and ugh. And
isn’t it often argued that everything exists on the internet? By channeling your inner Lewis
Carrol or Dr. Seuss and creating a neologism today (that adheres to the phonetics of Standard
English, of course), and plugging it into a Google search, one might find that he or she’s original
word is the already existing name of a business, a person, or is a slang word within some
subculture. Overtime, what is considered nonsense often begins to make sense because we adapt
it into our culture or consider its purpose within a text. Whether a nonsense word becomes a part
of everyday conversation, gets left in the fantasy world it was intended to describe or live in, or
is your own personal slang word, it has merit because it is a testament to the enriched and
nuanced language that was a product of the Inkhorn Controversy.
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Works Cited
Bragg, Melvyn. The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language. New York: Arcade
Pub., 2004. Print.
Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass. London: Macmillan & Co, 1872. Project Gutenberg.
Web. 30 Nov. 2014.
Geisel, Theodor Seuss. Dr. Seuss's ABC. New York: Random House Children's, 1960. Print.
Lamm, Jodi. "Making Phonological Sense out of Nonsense Poetry." Working Papers in
Linguistics. 8 (2011): n. pag. Web. 30 Nov. 2014.
Mabillard, Amanda. Words Shakespeare Invented. Shakespeare Online. 20 Aug. 2000. Web. 30
Nov. 2014.
Mihalicek, Verdana, and Christen Wilson, eds. Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to
Language and Linguistics. 11th ed. Ohio State UP, 2011. Print.