The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow."If only you’d spoken before!It’s excessively awkward to mention it now,With the Snark, so to speak, at the door!"We should all of us grieve, as you well may believe,If you never were met with again —But surely, my man, when the voyage began,You might have suggested it then?I submit for your perusal the word uffish in the above lines. Lewis Carroll explained it thus:
"it (uffish) seemed to suggest a state of mind when the voice is gruffish, the manner roughish, and the temper huffish."Yowsuh … I shall put it to you that all this Carrollian neologicomania was nothing more than a clever, crypto-linguistic metatheory (hatched, no doubt, in some "scenic" bathing machine) which attempts to explain the Origin of Language in the Human Species by means of the Clochetic Rule-of-Three!
Simply put, the learned Mister Carroll was pointing out, through repeated utterances of neologisms such as uffish and brillig and Boojum, that whatever we tell one another three times eventually does become true, that is to say, we need look no further for any linguistic First Cause than the simple observation that long, long ago, certain sounds became words through mere repetition. We might even say that sound becomes symbol through repetition, or even better, chaos becomes logic through repetition. So much for the Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything in It! Mister Carroll seems to have whittled it all down to a proper size, easily digestible and suitable for the masses.
Of course, there are always certain idle loafers lounging in every philosophical woodpile, hairshirt-wallahs such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, who dismissed the linguistic and logical implications of Carroll’s Clochetic Rule-of-Three by sniffing (in German, no less!) that it was as if
“someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true.”To which we reply: What rubbish! Quelle bêtise! Was für ein Quatsch!
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NB. Needless to say, our prelingual, Adamic ancestors did not read newspapers. They preferred perusing the above drawing and verses, which would have been engraved upon the walls of their semi-Platonic caves. Note carefully the plethora of doors delineated in both. These are the doors of perception, which, if cleansed, would allow everything to appear to the Snark concealed behind each of ‘em as it truly is — infinite! You do realize, don't you, that to these concealed Snarks,
we are the concealed infinity behind
their doors?
