“A little nonsense, now and then, is relished by the wisest men.”

So says Willy Wonka in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Imho nonsense should be relished by everyone. There’s something magical about it. But I’m horribly biased, because I was fed nonsense from an early age by my mother. She had a perfect memory of a vast array of it, including everything from Liverpool street songs to Edward Lear. This list of ten words, which relate in one way anther to nonsense, is devoted to her.

1. Verbigerate: To verbigerate is to repeat nonsense or cliches or just about anything meaningless. Young children verbigerate all the time. As far as I’m concerned, when my mother taught me doggerel of one form or another, she was simply filling the space that nowadays gets filled with TV adverts and pop songs. She taught me utter rubbish, like:

Supposing supposing,
The park gates were closing,
And you’d got your nose in,
Supposing, supposing.

And she would smile every time me or my brother or sister came out with that – which was far too frequent for most people’s tastes. She also taught me some truly distilled rubbish with not a word of sense in it. For example:

Rah rah racker rah
Racker rah rooney
Ecca pecka
Curiecker
Rum tum tush.

I have no idea what that is or where it came from or if it was ever intended to mean anything. I’ve surfed for it on the web. It’s not out there as far as I can tell. It’s nonsense handed down like an heirloom and, for some reason, I’m grateful for it. My mother only dealt whimsical nonsense and in that field she was formidable.

Since my original posting, Alison Raffalovich, a correspondent who read the book of the web site, sent me an email mentioning that in her family there was a similar nonsense tradition. she wrote:

“The particular ditty my father would recite (and my sisters and I would join in with happy shouts) was:

Itchy nitchy nee san
Deedle dohdle dominegg
Ahchy pahchy dominahchee
Ahm san doh!

I wonder now if it wasn’t some ‘learn to count in Japanese’ nursery rhyme variant?  Ich ni san are, I know now but didn’t then, one-two-three in Japanese.  My father served in the Pacific theater in WWII, so who knows?”

2. Blatherskite: This refers to a garrulous talker of nonsense. It is normally used in the pejorative manner to describe fish wives discussing the vicar’s legs and the price of eggs. For me it brings up an image of the Gabblerdictum, a creation of an early UK TV puppet show called Space Patrol. The Gabblerdictum was a Martian parrot who was taught by Irish genius, Professor Haggarty, to speak – but it didn’t really speak, it just gabbled. The Gabblerdictum was, as you’d expect, an amusing  character and its utterances were charming in the way that nonsense can be charming.

3. Idiolalia: Idiolalia is the use of a language invented by yourself. People inventing whole languages doesn’t happen often, but nonsense poets, notably Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, have invented many completely new words. Carroll’s poem, The Jabberwocky, is saturated with them, so much so that I’ve decided to devote another posting to the words in that poem (Click here to read it). Edward Lear was less prolific, but still brilliant. His major idiolalic contribution to the world is the word “runcible”.

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