Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Penguin) - Lewis Carroll [157]
21 manxome. There may be a suggestion of ‘manx’ provenance here, ‘manx’ being a reference to the inhabitants of the Isle of Man or ‘the Celtic language spoken on the Isle of Man’ (their ‘manx home’). But the obsolete Scottish word ‘mank’, from Latin mancus and French manque, can be an adjective meaning ‘maimed, mutilated, defective’ or a verb meaning ‘to maim, mangle, mutilate’; ‘manxome’ might on this version be an adjective composed on the model of ‘fearsome’ or ‘awesome’. Mangled language is the essence of ‘Jabberwocky’.
22 Tumtum tree. OED gives three quite different meanings: I. an imitation of a musical sound (as in ‘a nightmare of “tum-tum-tiddy-tum” and waltzes’, 1859); 2. an Anglo-Indian dog-cart; and 3. an abbreviation for ‘tummy’ (as in W. S. Gilbert’s ‘The pain is in my little tum’, 1868). Thinking musically, the ‘Tumtum tree’ might well be the natural habitat of the ‘Jubjub bird’; thinking physiologically it might be a Freudian complement of the ‘vorpal sword’.
23 uffish thought. Compare The Hunting of the Snark: ‘The Bellman looked uffish and wrinkled his brow’ (Fit 4, verse 1). In a letter Carroll gives an ‘explanation’: ‘It seems to suggest a state of mind when the voice is gruffish, the manner roughish, and the temper huffish’ (18 December 1877, Letters, vol I, p. 293).
24 whiffling through the tulgey wood. According to OED a ‘whiffle’ is a ‘trifle’ and ‘to whiffle’ is ‘to blow in puffs or slight gusts’, ‘to flutter in the wind’, ‘to talk idly’ or ‘to make a light whistling sound’. Carroll said he couldn’t explain ‘tulgey wood’ (Letters, vol I, p. 293).
25 burbled. In the same letter Carroll explained: ‘if you take the three verbs “bleat”, “m ur mur”, and “warble”, and select the bits I have underlined, it certainly makes “burble”; though I’m afraid I can’t distinctly remember having made it in that way’ (Letters, vol 1, p. 293). OED gives ‘burble’ as a verb meaning ‘to form bubbles’, ‘to gurgle’ (as in ‘burbling brook’); and ‘to perplex, confuse, muddle’ (as in a letter of Jane Carlyle, ‘his external life fallen into a horribly burbled state’).
26 galumphing. Compare The Hunting of the Snark: ‘The Beaver went simply galumphing about’ (Fit 4, verse 17). OED describes this as ‘invented by L. Carroll (perhaps with some reminiscence of gallop, triumphant)’. There may also be a suggestion of ‘lumping’ and ‘laughing’.
27 beamish. Compare The Hunting of the Snark: ‘But oh Beamish nephew, beware of the day’ (Fit 3, verse 10). Though it sounds Carrollian, OED gives it as a sixteenth-century word meaning ‘radiant, shining brightly’.
28 O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! OED defines ‘frab’ as a dialect verb meaning ‘to harass, worry’ and ‘frabble’ as ‘confused wrangling’, but ‘frabjous’ as ‘a nonsense word invented by L. Carroll’, with the suggestion of ‘fair’ and ‘joyous’. There may be a touch of the ‘fabulous’ too. ‘Callooh’ is an arctic duck known in Scotland, but may have suggestions of Greek kalos meaning ‘beautiful’.
29 chortled. Defined by the OED as ‘A factitious word introduced by the author of Through the Looking-Glass, and jocularly used by others after him, with some suggestion of chuckle and of snort’. It is appropriate that Carroll’s nonsensical philological play earned his book a place in the greatest monument of nineteenth-century philology.
30 somebody killed something. Alice’s confusion is a model for the disorientating effects of all nonsense. But, though she is confused by the semantic references, she nevertheless understands the murderous shape of the plot. Tenniel’s picture makes the knightly Pre-Raphaelite hero of the tale very like Alice but turns the monster s/he kills into a senile waistcoated hybrid, with dragon wings, fish face, spider talons, and a lizard’s feet and tail – a creature as archaic and composite as the language of the tale itself. The picture was to have been the frontispiece of the book but