Alphabetical (27 page)

Word-play with ‘n' gives us ‘ninny', a ‘no-no', some people's word for a ‘dummy' – a ‘num-num', ‘nanny', ‘nan' and ‘nana'. John Donne said, ‘No man is an island' which gives you a ‘no', an ‘-n is', and an ‘-n island'. (Alliteration sometimes works by linking the ends of words to the beginnings of the next.) Feste sings, ‘Hey nonny nonny . . .'

N
IS FOR NONSENSE

N
ONSENSE ISN'T REALLY
no sense. It makes a different or a new kind of sense. Pity it wasn't called ‘new-sense'. Most of it depends on creating new worlds, new creatures and new language. In this sphere of language, nonsense writers are keen on playing with or ‘disrupting' things that we accept as normal – like words themselves, songs that we've been taught and school routines.

Alphabet rhymes have been around for over 300 years. They seem to have started out in a robust and boisterous way. Iona and Peter Opie in their magnificent
Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
quote John Eachard from 1671 who writes of:

    
A Apple-pasty,

    
B bak'd it,

    
C cut it,

    
D divided it,

    
E eat it,

    
F fought for it,

    
G got it . . .

By 1712 rhymes like this were doing the rounds:

    
A was an archer who shot at a frog

    
B was a butcher, and had a great dog.

    
C was a captain, all covered with lace,

    
D was a drunkard, and had a red face . . .

A hundred years later things had got much more strait-laced:

    
A Apple, a

    
 

    
The APPLE with its rosy cheek,

    
Doth first begin this pretty toy;

    
How sweet it tastes! and oft is made

    
The prize of each good natur'd boy . . .

 

    
K King, k

 

    
This is the man who, next to God,

    
Is plac'd to keep mankind in awe;

    
Happy the people whose good King

    
Is judg'd and judges by the law.

That came in a little book that was for the ‘amusement and instruction of
GOOD CHILDREN
'. Presumably, if they weren't good, then reading this would make them good.

Nonsense feeds off stuff like this and the first author to take up the challenge was Edward Lear. He was the twentieth of twenty-one children, the son of a stockbroker who went bust. He suffered from epilepsy and depression all his life, calling one the ‘Demon' and the other the ‘Morbids'. His first interest was drawing, which took him to London Zoo, painting exotic animals and birds. He found his nonsense voice through
entertaining the children of aristocrats when hired to paint the Earl of Derby's menagerie.

His first alphabet comes from about 1846 and he went on writing alphabets for specific children for much of the rest of his life. He began doing these rather non-nonsensically: ants, butterflies, cobwebs and ducks doing what ants, butterflies, cobwebs and ducks usually do.

By 1870, he was talking of ‘The Absolutely Abstemious Ass, who resided in a Barrel, and only lived on Soda Water and Pickled Cucumbers. The Bountiful Beetle, who always carried a Green Umbrella when it didn't rain, and left it at home when it did . . .' He coped with the letter ‘X' by writing, ‘The Excellent Double-extra XX imbibing King Xerxes who lived a long time ago.' He seems to have realized that he could put in imaginary creatures by the time he writes: ‘The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, whose Head was ever so much bigger than his Body, and whose Hat was rather small.'

This comes several years after the publication of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
which had been full of parodies of Sunday School songs. Children's literature was offering Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear a space in which to subvert some of the certainties of Victorian life. Lear produced one alphabet for very young children whose nonsense is to do with how it plays with the sounds of English, much as children do as they teach themselves how to talk:

    
A was once an apple pie

    
Pidy

    
Widy

    
Tidy

    
Pidy

    
Nice insidy

    
Apple-Pie!

He also wrote one where the convention is that the letter ‘A' is a person or creature and every letter responds or acts through the poem:

    
A tumbled down, and hurt his Arm, against a bit of wood.

    
B said, ‘My Boy!, O! do not cry; it cannot do you good!'

Just as Lear animated his physical and mental problems with the ‘Demon' and the ‘Morbids', so he animates objects and letters:

    
W said, ‘Some Whisky-Whizzygigs, fetch some marbles and a ball!'

    
 

    
Z said, ‘Here is a box of Zinc! Get in, my little master!

    
We'll shut you up! We'll nail you down! We will, my little master!

    
We think we've all heard quite enough of this your sad disaster!'

As is often the case with Lear, the whole thing ends in some kind of physical disruption, dismemberment or constraint.

Children themselves get up to all sorts of disruptive things with letters and spellings. For example, spelling difficulty – or spelling ‘difficulty':

Mrs D

Mrs I

Mrs F, F, I

Mrs C

Mrs U

Mrs L, T, Y.

This may have come from a mnemonic for spelling ‘Mississippi':

Mrs M

Mrs I

Mrs Double S, I

Mrs Double S, I

Mrs P, P, I.

There are many versions of a ‘name game', a kind of mock-spelling, mock-sounding-out of letters. Ones I've collected go something like this:

You start with the person's name: Lucy. You then rhyme it by taking off the ‘L' and replacing it with ‘bomb', after which you say, ‘Sticker Lucy, Fi-fucy', reverse that, and tie it all up with a ‘That's how to spell Lucy':

    
Lucy Bombucy

    
Sticker Lucy, Fi-fucy.

    
Fi-fucy, Sticker Lucy.

    
That's how you spell Lucy.

When Lucy told me that, Toni said:

    
Toni Hiphoney

    
Stickaloney, Biboney

    
Hiphoney, Stickaloney

    
That's how

    
you spell Toni.

This reminded me of the game I was taught where you take a word and chop off one letter at a time. When you
get to the last letters, you can switch to saying the name of the letter to make it go with a zing. I do it with the word ‘everybody':

    
Everybody

    
verybody

    
erybody (say: erry-body)

    
rybody (say: rye-body)

    
ybody (say: why-body)

    
body (say: body)

    
ody (say: oddy)

    
dy (say: die)

    
y (say: why?)

All these work best if you can say them so quickly that people can't hear what you're doing. They just hear words being pulled apart and put back together again – a kind of mock spelling-out – in ways that they don't recognize. That's the point.

    
Shampoo

    
hampoo

    
ampoo

    
mpoo (say: em-poo)

    
poo

    
oo (say: ooo)

    
o (say: oh!)

Alphabet poems were intended to help children learn to read and I can't think of any reason why they wouldn't. The principle lying behind them is that familiarity with one letter at a time – in use in real words – will familiarize new readers
to the alphabetic principle. Repetition of a single letter in use leads you to alliteration and assonance. Put it into a verse with rhythm and rhyme and you have a challenge for readers: can you say this without stumbling? Can you learn it off by heart?

Something similar is going on with this old gag:

A new teacher says that she's going to find out everybody's name.

‘What's your name?' she says.

‘Pitsmiff, Miss,' the boy says.

‘Sorry?'

‘Pitsmiff, Miss,' he says.

The teacher turns to the boy next to him.

‘What did he say?'

‘His name's Pete Smith, Miss.'

‘Right,' said the teacher, ‘I see that we've got a bit of a clarity problem round here. When I ask you your name, I want you to say clearly:

‘“P, E, T, E, that's Peter, S, M, I, T, H, that's Smith, Pete Smith.”

‘Now, boy, what's your name?'

‘A, R, C, H, there's your Arch.

‘I, there's your I.

‘There's your Arch-i.

‘B, A, L, D – there's your bald.

‘There's your i-bald.

‘There's your arch-i-bald.

‘A, R, S, E, there's your Arse.

‘There's your bald Arse.

‘There's your i-bald Arse.

‘There's your Arch-i-bald Arse.

‘O, L, E, there's your Ole.

‘There's your Arse-ole.

‘There's your bald Arse-ole.

‘There's your i-bald Arse-ole.

‘There's your Arch-i-bald Arse-ole.

‘I, N, there's your in.

‘There's your ole-in.

‘There's your Arse-ole-in.

‘There's your bald Arse-ole-in.

‘There's your i-bald Arse-ole-in.

‘There's your Arch-i-bald Arse-ole-in.

‘Archibald Arseolein, Miss.'

Whatever their humour, these rhymes, jokes and tongue-twisters have another function: they draw attention to letters. Perhaps this is because letters are mysterious. There is nothing f-ish about ‘f', nothing ‘u-sounding' about the particular shape of a ‘u'. We learn in this ‘speech community' of English speakers that each letter has a name, it has ‘values' (sounds we can make when we see it), and, more importantly, when we combine the letters, and see them on a page, we make them sound like words and phrases that make sense. It's obvious, but it's only obvious because we've learned it. It isn't obvious for any rational reason like, say, a bike is a bike because people invented it, modified it and you can see the way it works.

One of the reasons why we have a genre of disruptive, nonsensical rhymes and jokes is that it brings to the surface our feelings of mystery or our state of unknowing and relieves us of any anxiety or irritation we might have.

The best disruption of ‘spelling-out' that I know is ‘key-jug',
as taught me by an Australian child. Just spell a name or phrase the usual way, but as you say each letter add ‘key' quickly after it and ‘key-jug' at the end of each word. It makes a nonsensical, alphabetical jazz.

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