All Mimsy Were The Borogoves Meaning

[Michelle Benitone]

Millions of years in the distant future, a posthuman scientist is attempting to build a time machine and tests it by sending a box with a hastily gathered batch of educational toys into the ancient past. When the box fails to return, he constructs another and tests it the same way, but it also fails to return. Believing the entire experiment to be a failure, he discontinues his efforts and gives up on time machines. However, the first box arrives in the middle of the twentieth century and the second in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but both have had their time-travel circuitry irreparably damaged by the journey.

The first box of toys travels back to 1942 and is discovered by a seven-year-old boy named Scott Paradine, who takes it home. The toys include a small transparent cube that both follows and interacts with the holder's thoughts, a wire maze puzzle employing a fourth dimension, and a detailed anatomical doll that possesses modified versions of human organs, plus unknown additional structures. As Scott and his two-year-old sister, Emma, play with the toys, the brain activity of the two develops in unusual ways.

Although their parents are often preoccupied with their own lives, they notice unusual things going on with their children, such as strange conversations and nonsensical drawings, and the parents become worried. They consult with a child psychologist, Rex Holloway, who quickly recognizes the strangeness of the toys, and suspects them to be of extraterrestrial origin. Holloway surmises that the toys are "educating" the children and introducing an "X factor" into Scott's and Emma's thought processes, such as geometry that is unrelated to, and incompatible with, Euclidean geometry. He believes their developing young minds are pliable enough to be profoundly affected by the devices.

While still behaving mostly as normal children, the two occasionally show signs of developing unusual thought patterns, such as a conversation between Scott and his father about how salmon reproduce, in which Scott thinks it would be natural for a species to "send" its eggs upstream in a river, to hatch, and the young would choose to return to "the ocean" when they were sufficiently developed. Scott also wonders why humans still choose to live here, in the time and space of Earth, an idea that puzzles his father.

Holloway convinces the Paradine parents to take the toys away from the children, so that the children can return to normal development, and he attempts to study the toys himself, with little success. Meanwhile, the children continue thinking in the new patterns and communicating with each other in strange ways, including in their sleep and using strange words. Out of their parents' view, Scott begins collecting and creating small items for an abstract machine, largely at Emma's direction and guidance; she has more knowledge about how to construct the machine, but he has the skill to create it.

The second box arrives in 19th century England and is found by a child (implied to be Alice Liddell), who one day recites some verse learned from one of its contents to her "Uncle Charles" (Charles Dodgson, better known today as Lewis Carroll). Intrigued, he asks her its meaning; whereupon she, uncertain, identifies it as "the way out". Dodgson, in reply, promises to include it in his collection of writings about the stories she tells him, which are based on the toys from the box. He tells her that, unlike the other parts, which he has to modify so that adults can understand them, he will include this verse exactly as she told it to him.

Back in 1942, Scott and Emma have encountered Carroll's fantasy book Through the Looking-Glass, containing the poem "Jabberwocky". In its words, they identified the time-space equation that guided their production, organization, and operation of the abstract machine; the title of the short story is a line from the poem. One day, their father hears the children's cries of excitement from upstairs in their house and he arrives in the doorway of Scott's bedroom, just in time to see his young son and daughter vanish in a direction he cannot comprehend.

At the prompt of a second kind commenter, let me note that the modifier all doesn't help us figure out whether to choose noun or adjective for mimsy. (Perhaps this part of the sly whimsy of the Deacon Dodgson.) If we're thinking noun, then all is an acceptable as a universal determinative, as in

(Note the ambiguity. In an intensifying role -- We are all very excited -- the Ngram viewer finds few examples in the 19th century, and it seems to be an American colloquialism. The universal role -- We are all of us excited -- is common and earlier.)

antsy artsy backwoodsy bitsy blousy blowsy1 bluesy booksy bossy bousy2 brassy busy3 cheesy choosy citrusy classy clumsy4 cosy5 creasy cutesy6 ditsy dressy drowsy7 easy flimsy8 flossy folksy fussy gassy glassy glossy gneissy goosy grassy greasy gutsy hissy kissy lossy lousy messy minstrelsy mossy mousy mussy newsy noisy nosy outdoorsy primrosy prissy queasy9 rosy sassy sudsy teensy10 tipsy tricksy weensy11 woodsy wussy

apostasy autopsy biopsy catalepsy controversy courtesy curtsy daisy dropsy dyspepsy ecstasy embassy epilepsy fantasy footsy geodesy gypsy heresy hypocrisy hypostasy idiosyncrasy isostasy jealousy leprosy narcolepsy necropsy palsy pansy pleurisy poesy pussy speakeasy whimsy

Given the distribution favoring adjectives of words ending in -sy, the lexical likelihood of finding a related noun, the syntactic constraints on number, and the fact that this is a poem, where the subject/adjectival-complement order may be inverted, a fluent English speaker will consider that mimsy is an adjective meaning having the qualities of a mim, some noun unknown.

Later in the book, Humpty Dumpty gives Alice an explanation of the odd words in the poem and he defines 'mimsy' as 'miserable and flimsy'. In other words, we know it is an adjective because Lewis Carroll intended it to be one.

Fortunately, Carroll's own definition assigns the part of speech to 'mimsy'. Otherwise, the word might now be taken as an early and unprecedented appearance of the British regional 'mimsy', also an adjective, but with a somewhat different meaning, although latterly sometimes influenced by Carroll's coinage:

The first part of the compound, 'mim', has a much earlier provenance, first appearing around 1586, and attested through 1991. It is also an adjective (and adverb), used regionally in Scottish and British English:

Reserved or restrained in manner or behaviour, esp. in a contrived or priggish way; affectedly modest, demure; primly silent, quiet; affectedly moderate or abstemious in diet (rare). Also (occas.) of a person's appearance.

However, Carroll himself was kind enough to differentiate between his 'mimsy' and the British regional 'mimsy'. As Humpty Dumpty explained to Alice, 'mimsy' is a portmanteau of 'flimsy' and 'miserable' (Through the Looking Glass, 1871):

The portmanteau clearly amounts to something akin to 'unhappy', but if there was any doubt, that meaning is made explicit in Carroll's gloss of the first verse of "Jabberwocky", first published in Carroll's own literary magazine, Mischmasch, in 1855.

The evidence from the 1855 Mischmasch, along with the evidence given by Humpty Dumpty in the 1871 Through the Looking Glass, leaves no doubt that 'mimsy' is an adjective. Without that evidence, 'mimsy' could well be a noun, verb or even a subdued interjection in poetic use.

The poem is a pastiche of heroic poetry such as Beowulf. This inversion is generally seen by native English speakers as old-fashioned/archaic. There are many other archaic constructions in the poem too - just in that first verse, "twas midnight" and "the slithy toves did gyre" are forms which were no longer in use in spoken English at the time Carroll wrote it.

Whilst this is amusing in its own right, it's also a dig at the Victorian poets who were (in all seriousness) writing heroic poetry and using these archaic constructions to try to add gravitas to their writing. Edward Lear did the same with some of his nonsense rhymes - The Cummerbund is a prime example, although Lear took it a step further by using genuine words. (Look up the actual meanings for the Indian words referenced!)

This tells us that the original example has had its subject inverted, because subject-verb inversion applies only in root (unembedded) clauses. So we know that "the borogoves" is subject, and "were" agrees in number with that subject:

Language is dynamic and mobile. If Dickens makes up a word and it sticks because it describes a useful texture, then it becomes part of the language. Texture-words, I think, tend to be more easily coin-able than other kinds of words, because of the fuzzy interchangeability of their sound and appearance that I hope my 'INTEXTs' demonstrate. We see "toddle" in an Eliot novel - is it a word? "Gabble"? Did these ever become institutionally-accepted words, and when did they if they did?

In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty gives explanations of the coinages here, including the by-now standard definition of the 'portmanteau' coinage: "two meanings packed up into one word." In fact, this definition doesn't do justice to the coinages in Carroll's own poem, which play on the instability inherent in texture-words (even 'real' ones). As I've suggested in my Introduction to this project, texture-words (the ones that obey rules I can identify) tend to have a certain fuzzy-doubling at their heart, which results in incomplete referentiality and fuzziness of meaning. Coinages like gimble, mimsy, and burble may be semantically based on "gimlet," "lithe and miserable," and bubble, but the sound of the coinages multiplies and troubles potential meanings as an effect of texture.

Although I've highlighted some of the texture-words here constructed out of the rules I've been following with regard to my 'INTEXT' tables, the fact is that this poem makes those rules seem quite minor. Words like galumphing and snicker-snack evoke textures through sound-plays I'm not quite sure how to categorize. Perhaps reference to orthodox linguistics could help in that regard.

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