Brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble -- in the wabe

By J. L. Speranza
--- For the Grice Club.

---

ALICE. Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called "Jabberwocky"?

HUMTPY DUMPTY. Let's hear it. I can explain all the poems that were ever invented -- and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.

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

HUMPTY DUMPTY [interrupting]. That's enough to begin with. There are plenty of hard words there. 'Brillig' means four o'clock in the afternoon -- the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.'

ALICE. That'll do very well. And 'slithy'?

HUMPTY DUMPTY. Well, 'slithy' means 'lithe and slimy.' 'Lithe' is the same as 'active.' You see it's like a portmanteau -- there are two meanings packed up into one word.

ALICE [thoughtfully]. I see it now. And what are 'toves'?

HUMPTY DUMPTY. Well, 'toves' are something like badgers -- they're something like lizards -- and they're something like corkscrews.

ALICE. They must be very curious looking creatures.

HUMPTY DUMPTY. They are that. Also they make their nests under sun-dials -- also they live on cheese.

ALICE. And what's to 'gyre' and to 'gimble'?

HUMPTY DUMPTY. To 'gyre' is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To 'gimble' is to make holes like a gimblet.

ALICE. And 'the wabe' is the grass-plot round a sun-dial, I suppose?

HUMPTY DUMPTY. Of course it is. It's called 'wabe,' you know, because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it -- '

ALICE. And a long way beyond it on each side.

HUMPTY DUMPTY. Exactly so.

-------

ROGER BISHOP JONES commented on "Anarchic versus liberal Humpty-Dumptyism":

"This humpty dumpty discussion goes, it seems to me, to the very heart of my concerns about analytic philosophy in the twentieth century."

Not to mention Carroll's polemic with Mill early in the nineteenth! (I was fascinated to read Sutherland, "Language and Lewis Carroll", one of the best things ever published by that pretentious Mouton Janua Linguarum Series Major!).

----

Recall that Grice would expand on

Carnap's rather innocuous "pirots karulise elatically". (Hospers suggested that a pirot is a ten-story building).

As Chapman quotes from an unpublished lecture by Grice (in The Grice Collection), entitled, "How pirots karulise elatically: some simpler ways" (a parody on Austin: How to talk: some simpler ways"), Grice proposed to construct a formal semantic system starting where Carnap had left.

So we are treated, Chapman writes, to pieces of ingenuity like:

---

"a pirot a can be said to potch of some obble x

as fang or feng; also to cotch of x, or some obble o,

as fang or feng; or to cotch of some obble o and another

obble o' as being fid to one another."

----- (Grice, BANC 135/90).

"Some way into the first lecture," Chapman writes, alla Humpty Dumpty, "[Grice] offers the audience the key to this code. Pirots are much like ourselves, they inhabit a world of obbles very much like our own world. To potch is something like to perceive, and to cotch something like to think. Feng and fang are possible descriptions, much like our adjectives. Fid is a possible relation between obbles." (Chapman, p. 123).

----

The formalisation I propose here involves the symbol:

"P" for pirot

and

"K" for "karulize".

---

This yields the 'meaning postulate':

MP

(x)Px --> Kx.

Note that in the translation to English of Carnap's classic where the sentence first occurs, the whole point in Carnap (which I hope is what Waismann, who knew him, elaborates in his Analysis piece -- I am hoping for a more sympathetic reader than Quine!) is to provide for:

(x)Px --> Kx
Pa
----
Kx

In Carnap's precise words:

Pirots karulise elatically.
A is a pirot.
----
A karulises elatically.

---

For Carnap had written in ways that had influenced and inspired the best of logicians. Just consider:

"A Logician of Science", by H. Cairns (1946): "From Pirots karulize elatically and A is a Pirot, we can infer that A karulizes elatically, without
knowing the meaning of the three words ...
www.jstor.org/stable/27537666

"The Place of Logic in a World of Fact" (L. O. Kattsoff) (1949): "Carnap's example that "from Pirots karulize elatically and A is a Pirot, we can infer
A karulizes elatically" also involves definite assumptions, ...
www.jstor.org/stable/2103252

or "A Preface to Logic", "Professor Carnap defends the position that
logical inference is independent of
meaning by an example:
From Pirots karulize
elatically and A is a Pirot, ...
www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=6303302

----

I recall A. Grossi pointing out to me some material by D. Evans on an author pointing to the fact that the idea here is 'syncategorematic' (which perhaps in the long run is the best way to describe 'logical constant') and other in something like:

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

Note that Alice inquires, logically, for 'brillig', 'slithy', 'tove', 'gyre', 'gimble', and 'wabe' (from lines 1-2).

She does NOT need to inquire about, ''twas', 'and', 'the', 'did', and 'in'. We can go further, she KNOWS that 'brillig' is an adjective (I keep the copies of a magazine I edited with Peter Willemoes, which we called "Mischmasch" and KNOW that this was first published as a "Stanza" of Anglo-Saxon verse in Carroll's own Mischmasch, so the parody is on the -ig Anglo-Saxon suffix that yields modern English -y. She KNOWS that 'toves' is PLURAL, so she uses the correct question, "What are toves?". She knows that 'gyre' and 'gimble' are verbs, in the preterite (with the 'did' -- as is the ''twas'), and she undertands 'in' -- in 'in the wabe').

This yields

`Twas [x]-y, and the [y] [z]-s
Did [x'] and [y'] in the [z'].

---- very much as one can work with the 'logical form' that Witters despised and which Mill and Carroll were leading Frege onto, in things like

(x) Px --> Kx
Pa
---
Ka

-----

There is more to be said about logical form here. I would expect that "pirots karulise elatically" only IMPLICATES "all pirots", that is the standard reading for (Ax) (Grice, WoW: 22). Grice expands on this in 2001, when considering, Jill's "Jack is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave" -- is the enthymeme that "all" Englishmen are brave? And if so, is that a matter of mere induction? Etc.

Grice was especially fascinated with the pirot in that it allowed him to play with Locke (as per the Essay in R. B. Jones's website) when he refers to "very intelligent, rational parrots". Grice thus speaks of "very intelligent, rational pirots", and in general plays with pirots TALKING. Oddly, Austin's retort ("That's where you make your big mistake") strikes back with a small vengeance here (to Grice's, "I don't give a hoot what the dictionary says", cited as archival material by Chapman) for I discovered -- logically enough when browsing the OED2 -- that 'pirot' does indeed exist, and it is a kind of fish.

---- Alas, the people at OED -- I hope they keep my query -- told me that pirot would need some further usage to make it to the OED. But then, what I suggested, amusingly, was something like.

PIROT. fish. Also used by Carnap, (tr.), "Pirots karulise elatically", and taken up by Grice, "Method in philosophical psychology" (1975). Section, 'Pirotological' content. -- etc.

I have expanded on pirotologica elsewhere -- notably Classics-l!