“A little nonsense, now and then, is relished by the wisest men.”
So says Willy Wonka in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Imho nonsense should be relished by everyone. There’s something magical about it. But I’m horribly biased, because I was fed nonsense from an early age by my mother. She had a perfect memory of a vast array of it, including everything from Liverpool street songs to Edward Lear. This list of ten words, which relate in one way anther to nonsense, is devoted to her.
1. Verbigerate: To verbigerate is to repeat nonsense or cliches or just about anything meaningless. Young children verbigerate all the time. As far as I’m concerned, when my mother taught me doggerel of one form or another, she was simply filling the space that nowadays gets filled with TV adverts and pop songs. She taught me utter rubbish, like:
Supposing supposing,
The park gates were closing,
And you’d got your nose in,
Supposing, supposing.
And she would smile every time me or my brother or sister came out with that – which was far too frequent for most people’s tastes. She also taught me some truly distilled rubbish with not a word of sense in it. For example:
Rah rah racker rah
Racker rah rooney
Ecca pecka
Curiecker
Rum tum tush.
I have no idea what that is or where it came from or if it was ever intended to mean anything. I’ve surfed for it on the web. It’s not out there as far as I can tell. It’s nonsense handed down like an heirloom and, for some reason, I’m grateful for it. My mother only dealt whimsical nonsense and in that field she was formidable.
Since my original posting, Alison Raffalovich, a correspondent who read the book of the web site, sent me an email mentioning that in her family there was a similar nonsense tradition. she wrote:
“The particular ditty my father would recite (and my sisters and I would join in with happy shouts) was:
Itchy nitchy nee san
Deedle dohdle dominegg
Ahchy pahchy dominahchee
Ahm san doh!
I wonder now if it wasn’t some ‘learn to count in Japanese’ nursery rhyme variant? Ich ni san are, I know now but didn’t then, one-two-three in Japanese. My father served in the Pacific theater in WWII, so who knows?”
2. Blatherskite: This refers to a garrulous talker of nonsense. It is normally used in the pejorative manner to describe fish wives discussing the vicar’s legs and the price of eggs. For me it brings up an image of the Gabblerdictum, a creation of an early UK TV puppet show called Space Patrol. The Gabblerdictum was a Martian parrot who was taught by Irish genius, Professor Haggarty, to speak – but it didn’t really speak, it just gabbled. The Gabblerdictum was, as you’d expect, an amusing character and its utterances were charming in the way that nonsense can be charming.
3. Idiolalia: Idiolalia is the use of a language invented by yourself. People inventing whole languages doesn’t happen often, but nonsense poets, notably Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, have invented many completely new words. Carroll’s poem, The Jabberwocky, is saturated with them, so much so that I’ve decided to devote another posting to the words in that poem (Click here to read it). Edward Lear was less prolific, but still brilliant. His major idiolalic contribution to the world is the word “runcible”.
~ Master Yoda
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“Kintugs”
It is a nonsense word for cool, mint, aewsome!
[No it's not. It's an attempt to advertise using a comment on my web site. Sadly, because of an editing slip, the brand name has been misspelled. Aewsome has also been misspelled, but you can blame that on the poster.]
just great fun to read.
never realised that so many Irish (Gaelic) words had made it to the English language.
As Booker T. Washington noted “We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary,” or as it says in the book Words You Don’t Know, “English is a whoring slut of a language, happy to consort with just about any other language it meets. Our beloved English can be forgiven for inheriting words from Welsh, Gaelic, Greek, Latin, German and French, but Swedish, Polish, Serbo-Croat, Hindi, Arabic, Swahili, Urdu, Aborigine, Chinese, Japanese, American Indian languages? Does the lady have no shame?”
I’m researching for my own amusement a purple-prose baseball article from the May 24, 1895, Quincy (Illinois) Herald and trying to discover the genius author’s identity. The article includes the sentence, “Everything was yellow, rocky and whangbasted, like a stigtossel full of doodle-gammon.” Googling I found that poet-editor Ridgely Torrence included in a letter of 7/17/1910, “half a stigtossel of dogglegammon, (that ghostly porridge).” Perhaps he invented the phrase years before? “Gammon” can be bacon, so perhaps dogglegammon is some thin bacon soup. Otherwise I’ve not found “stigtossel” nor “dogglegammon” in any dictionary so far.
I’m not sure I can help much with this. Here’s all I’ve got.
To “whang” is to beat with force and “baste” can have a similar meaning when it is not used in reference to cookery. So whangbasted conveys the sense of “beaten up”
“Stigtossel is uncertain, although it probably refers to a container. “Stig” most likely refers to a commoner (someone from a poor background). “Tossel” is less certain. In some contexts toss means to vomit, but more likely it’s a kind of bowl or plate, or maybe even a drinking vessel.
Gammon is gammon of course, but it’s a British word, which probably saw little use in Illinois. The “doodle” may well be from Yankee Doodle, since there are recipes for Yankee Doodle Stew (based on beef). One could easy substitute gammon for beef in the stew – in which case, the result might well qualify as a ghostly porridge.
As for who the author is, I’d suggest seeking out an 1890s immigrant from the British Isles.
The only reference I’ve run into that you may not have encountered is here (in the second column page 238 – where doodle gammon is given as two words):
http://books.google.com/books?id=CPodAQAAIAAJ&pg=RA3-PA238&lpg=RA3-PA238&dq=whangbasted&source=bl&ots=sPzCPt5Stt&sig=gpM93tm93l8Y2NVQ-wRFmfns-SI&hl=en&ei=7ad9S_L8CYyRtgeirvWXCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=whangbasted&f=false
Excellent and entertaining nonsense, by the way.
Thanks for your prompt and knowledgeable reply. The reference link you provided was commenting on the very article I’m investigating. As with other articles about the article, it freely changes spellings from the original. (The original hyphenates doodle-gammon.) Most notably for my purpose, it outright substitutes “glass” for “stigtossel,” so I think I can assume that is its meaning!
In P.J. Wodehouse’s “Piccadilly Jim”, first published in the USA in 1917, the main character, Jimmy Crocker, an American who has a terible hangover, says to his butler: ‘You start the day with the fairest prospects, and before nightfall everything is as rocky and ding-basted as stig tossed full of doodle-gammon. Why is this, Bayliss?’ ‘Icouldn’t say sir’.
Blatherskite was often used in the early years of LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE by Harold Gray, the creator, writer and artist. It was used by him to be a derogatory name calling of a male (usually) Such as: “He’s an old blatherskite.”
Actually I think idiolalia would also pertain to when children make up their own languages. It happens a lot between twins who aren’t socilized properly and my friends had this. Also when I was little I made up my own language that only I knew because my parents wouldn’t teach me another language and I wanted to really bad.
Sounds right to me. How curious.
I’ve always thought that the meaning of “runcible” were obvious to any thoughtful punster.
It’s a play on “run-see-able”; hence able to draw attention, noticeable, or visible, but also implying urgency for successful observation.
giddelydid-didbadadeedodofleediddado is a word meaning to have a good time
I am looking for any information on the word, “spaalegraten”. It was used by a grandfather to answer a child’s inquiry, “What’s for dinner?”.
Well I looked, but could find very little. Th etymology maybe from some variant of sparling – a young herring, and graten, which is fishbone, from the German. So fish bones of some kind. Perhaps some fishbone soup.
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