Speccie Twas Brillig
 

A lovely Kipling from Bazza runs away with the fiver. Frank and Bill are in hot pursuit, Bill with a Belloc surely. Now for this week which ought to test you.

NO. 2714: jabberwocky
You are invited to supply a poem that begins ‘’Twas brillig...’ and continue, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll, using your own neologisms, for up to 16 lines. Please email entries, if possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 14 September.

Twas brilling and the cryptal ball
besparkled unctious lobotome;
and lorned across the vauxy haul
conspurred the perignome.

“Aright the ship!” the lardok shawt,
“or fumile vauxness all will be!
Reload! Reblast!” The lardok’s caught
the perignomes’ mallee.

And piffed, the last mallee pergoes,
“Oh sprae my gra!” The lardok glees.
With vix he barrel-locks its toes
and chobbles down the keys.

I question "the" in line four, and prefer "by" at that point.

"Shart" instead of "shawt"?
"Refress" instead of "reblast"? "Reblast" is too granular and objective.

"Pergoes" reminds of "pergola"; I offer "bergoos".
"Piffed" ... ?
"Thift" instead?

I think "Oh sprae my gra" is too delightful to discuss outside of a Victoria's Secret catalogue.

Also, too many "k"s. "Lardoc."
And something less fatty-sounding. "Lard"?

Superabundance of "x"s.

Good luck with this.

A Jaffa at the Waca

'Twas brillig when the googly seams
In badman Bradman’s dobber dreams.
It was the beamer deftly steered
That parted Grace’s bushy beard.
Yahoo that yorker, man alive,
With chinese cut and harrow drive,
And make an outing of an innings,
Building a tonk from small beginnings
By giving humpty to the offie.

Alas, I cannot slog for toffee.
I’ve got the yips, I’m out of luck.
A golden gazzer spells a duck.
A double teapot spells a sledge.
The doosra takes my leading edge.
Though three short legs are out of joint
I dolly it to silly point.

Full marks for general incomprehensibility, John. But do you suppose The Reverend Dodgson actually hung out with a secret sect of religious fundamentalists who plied their deviant divinity with ritualistically slithied offerings borne aloft by Mom(e) Rat(h)s, through the sacred (boro)groves? A branch of the Variety Club, perhaps?

Howzat?

The difficulty with this competition is not inventing words - any fool can do that - but inventing words that sound as if they exist. My piece contains no invented words but plenty not in the dictionary. I am glad it is incomprehensible to you. It is practically incomprehensible to me. 'Let's give it some humpty' is the best known saying of the prophet Fat Iron Bottom. And of course he did.

Find it incomprehensible? Moi?

You wrong me - every way you wrong me, Brutus!

I meant a sort of a smug of a "caviar to the general" sort of a...

I left you a clue in my final word.

John, I don't know whether your offering is 'in the spirit of Lewis Carroll' but it has some very memorable lines and will be a contribution to cricketing comedy whatever its fate in the comp.

'Twas brillig, with the glibral Clegg
All torque and tongue-trip on TV
So mullient his polly-egg
Grease-poles refulged in ecstasy.

A challenging competition, with the danger of incomprehensible tedium on one side and a lapse into Unwinese on the other. Hmm . . .

Unwinese. Ah deep joy!
The previous comp (malapropisms) comp risks raising the ghost of the great Stanley in a similar way.

John,

I have committed this gaff myself: shouldn't you begin with "Twas brillig"?

Thank you, Lance. I have made an adjustment, though as a poem it is better as it was. Curiously I have discovered a market for cricket poems, though they have to be short as a sportsman's attention span.

'Twas brillig and the boluses
Of syllabub and burdockpop
Went fizzling in the calphalon,
A pinch of palt-a-malt atop.

Beware the hoi polloi, my boy,
Those rakish riffy-raffy tastes,
Those unsophisticated tongues,
Those portly, pinguefying waists.

Quatorzième at Ledoyen,
He hobnobbed with the cream of creams
To anti-bant and gallivant
Through odds and orts of pastry dreams:

Kue sus, kue sus, pâte à choux
And twee tuile go crunch-a-crunch --
Antoine Carême and Tallyrand
And Madame X are having lunch.

O eudaimonic esculent!
A denizen of chez Ducasse
To snub and sneer and snivel at
The peaky, peckish lower class.


And not a single nonce word!

And which four stanzas go through? They are all excellent.

Johnson, My Beamer 323 S-class only uses a harrow when I help my farmer neighbors. But Bradman's, well, I can't rally blame him, ah...

is panphrastic.

"They are all esculent."

But only Stanley can do a Stanley. Perhaps our transatlantic friends do not know him. Google Stanley Unwin, you fellows.

Frabjous, Orwn!

Thanks everyone. I didn't realize it is 4 lines too long. I think I shall snip S4's last two lines, combine it with S5's first, and write a new ending. Unless someone has a better idea.

Jesus! Another bleeding Arts man who can't count. Consider Shelley who was a fine chemist or, at any rate, a man who could make a good explosion if he was minded to.

Twas brillig when the cheap du jour
rang from the snout of the Whinnyflure
and all the fizzards of Canemacarry
(even the Beegluns who cheap so nary)
stepped from their hosiers and cheaped: Filure!

which goundled across the Fetid Inane
where the Gab at the Flitties careeshed their tane,
For never before had a Whinnyflure
gauched of his own a la shim: Filure!
The Squarry Malts cried out: Infane! .

Out came the Gab-at-the-Flitties en miss
to halt this influsion, this glave of polliss.
Their pithers went pize and their nabes ka-thunk
When the cormokadruther unfashed his Zunk,
the fizzards lay loozed by the noodling Niss.

Splendid suff, Lance. It reads like a translation from Rimbaud.

John, I had a room mate in college who used le Bateau Ivre as a sort of perverse Baedeker's guide Maybe--unbeknownst to me--some of his shenanigans du jour sank in.

As my favorite bumper sticker says, The mome rath doesn't live that can outgrabe me.

'Twas Brillig when two stiggish chorpals
Squanionned the beamish boy to chack
If he’d a license for his vorpals
Or pirmn to snicker-snack.

He’d been adserned de-slithing toves,
by PETA-pods upon the paths,
galumphing throon the borogoves
And grabing Un-momed raths.

He’s quawndered now, ‘neath key and lock
And sarpifies inside the pen;
For slaynjing the ‘dangered jabberwock,
A jirgle's glypped him five to ten.

Frank