I remember my old Poetry 101 professor reading us "Jabberwocky" in class one day and pronouncing the last word with a long "e" at the end: "out-grah-bee."
I felt violated. I was sure, just so sure, that the poem I first read in my aunt's old college English Lit textbook (found old and moldy in my granny's basement when I was but 14) had as its last word "out-grabe" -- rhyming with ... . Huh?
And that was the point. Other than Lewis Carroll's "portmanteau" rhyme in the poem ("wabe"), there isn't much that rhymes with "outgrabe," no matter how you pronounce it.
Carroll once explained, humorously, his concept of the famous "portmanteau" words used in his poem. But, like the piece of furniture they're named for, they can serve a variety of uses.
Last year, when I started this blog, I wrote about how George Boole discovered a flaw in classic Aristotelian logic -- called (I think) the "existential fallacy." In short, the terms of a syllogism do not need to exist for the syllogism to function. They can be abstract symbols, hence the name "symbolic logic."
Carroll (as math professor Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a researcher in Boolean algebra, nonlinear geometry and similar topics. He made significant contributions to the academic literature on symbolic logic. And "Jabberwocky" is his (I think, successful) attempt to put some of those basic concepts into language.
The "portmanteau" words in "Jabberwocky" don't mean anything. (I believe Carroll's own definitions of the words are knowingly tongue-in-cheek.) They are true "nonsense" words, in the sense that they have no sense at all. Nor do they need to have any for the poem to make sense. In a sense.
If we are to examine those "interstices" of language I spoke of back then in the post on Boole, I think we need to more fully understand Carroll's accomplishment in "Jabberwocky."
BTW, the poem is satire. Just what it ridicules is what's important.
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Afternote (2/12/19): Dodgson stuck to linear geometry.
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