Whangdoodles

“…what a terrible country it is! Nothing but thick jungles infested by the most dangerous beasts in the entire world—hornswogglers and snozzwangers and those terrible wicked whangdoodles.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

John Tenniel

Best known for his illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, John Tenniel is a British artist whose body of work defined the art scene of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

One of my favorite poems to share in Children’s Literature—or any environment for that matter—is Lewis Carroll’s Jaberwocky.

From both literature choices above, I have had the best of times with nonsense words. To me, these words are poetry themselves, actual art that invites the reader into an imaginative encounter. Most of what we read, like this blog post, is all locked down with semantics and symbols and punctuation and agreed upon standards. Nonsense words, however, ask us to go beyond what’s universally understood and to invent our own meanings.

Nonsense words encourage wordplay. Remeaning. Folkusing. Scramrambling.

I confess that I spend whole hours whistling, just improvising sound associations into fun rhythms and tones I like to change up. I think music is very flexible in this respect. As an untrained lover of music, I feel unfettered in my whistling.

However, word-whistling gets all mired in meaning. As soon as I fumbumble some something and stack phonemes into morphemes, someone will accuse me of making a mistake. That’s not how you say that! You’re not making any sense.

I’m not trying to make sense. I’m trying to make nothing of it.

I’m making art. I’m making love.

That’s some next level shizz there, when one can take conventional words and make more of them than they were by combining them with others. That there, friend, is poetry.

As you know if you’re a frequenter of this blog, I suffer from a lack of confidence, from imposter syndrome. I would like very much to be a poet, maybe even a Poet, but I doubt myself, my words, my assemblage as art. Whether it’s a nonsense word, a word pairing I like (whiskey fritters, for example) or a turn or twist of phrase, I am never sure it’s anything but fun for myself.

As I am my own consumer, I suppose that’s good enough.