Yesterday some of my pupils told me they’ve memorised poems to recite at the end-of-year performance tomorrow, and I asked one of them to recite it for me. Very nice too. They asked me if I know any poems, and I realised that I do. I only ever memorised one poem in my life, Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll, when I was about 13 or 14, and for some reason it’s stuck with me. So I gave an impassioned and theatrical rendition in front of the frankly befuddled class. Today I thought I’d extend things a bit, and so, taking the first stanza, which goes like this:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

I explained that many of the words are invented, but we can tell something about them by the context – that an article must mean it’s a noun, the ‘s’ at the end means the noun is probably plural, and so on. This is actually a rather interesting area for a linguist, as are the rules which govern fake-word validity (I made that up because it’s years and years since I read any research on this and I can’t be bothered to re-look it up) but I didn’t stray down that path with my nine year-olds. Instead I used the famous Tenniel illustration of the Jabberwock wiffling through the tuldgey wood, as an example of how we might imagine unknown words, and asked them all to draw illustrations of the first stanza – imagining when brillig might be, where is a wabe, what are raths, why are they mome and what does to gyre mean. Anyway, I thought this would be quite a fun, interesting task, but it turned out to be tortuously difficult to get them to understand that these words mean what you want them to mean; one boy asked if he could look up rath in the dictionary. The teacher I was working with said they’re not accustomed to using their imaginations – I don’t know if that’s true, perhaps – and if it is, rather sad I think. One girl told me – I don’t have an imagination, well of course you do, you’ve just got to exercise it.
Anyway, afterwards I’ll show them the Tenniel illustration of this stanza and we can see how they compare.

Incidentally, I occasionally dabble in fake-wordery myself, though I stray rather beyond the bounds of specifically anglo-saxon-isms, trying to inflect words with a variety of different languages. I’ve tried as well in Spanish, but that’s quite difficult.

And here’s yesterday‘s making-of gif – rather a long one, I’m afraid:

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