Awhile back I got to thinking about Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky.” Specifically I was thinking about the first stanza:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

This stanza makes Firefox’s spell checker light up like a Christmas tree. Many of the words were created by Carroll, of course. It makes an odd sort of sense even if you don’t immediately know what the words mean. To me, the most interesting one is brillig. It was defined by Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass. It refers to 4 o’clock in the afternoon and is derived from bryl or simply broil. It refers to the part of the day when a broiler would be lit to begin preparing dinner.

These days we don’t have to light the broiler at 4 to have dinner ready. Modern broilers heat up fairly quickly. I propose the adoption of the word grillig to refer to the hour when charcoal grills are lit for a barbecue.

The poem is also notable for introducing the Vorpal Blade to the world of enchanted weapons.

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

It enables the unnamed hero to slay the monster without getting pwn3d like a little bitch and dragged screaming back through the tulgey wood.

It’s really too bad that Lewis Carroll was preoccupied with mathematics, nonsense, and underage girls. The mythology in his works is somewhat underdeveloped, in my opinion.