Optical connections

William Ansley · 24 Oct 2002, 17:26 · from urth-v0210.mbox · original

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From: William Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Optical connections
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 13:26:34 -0400
Message-ID: <urth-v0210-1926 at digest.urth.net>
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At 12:20 AM 10/24/2002 -0400, you wrote:

>One Peace note: in that stream of consciousness part near the beginning=20
>(about the synthetic deer and the orange tribe) Weer asks "What is a wabe?"
>It appears in Jabberwocky and I found a website which gives Carroll's=20
>definitions as well as Humpty Dumpty's:
>
>Wabe (derived from the verb to swab or soak).
>The side of a hill (from its being soaked by the rain.)
>
>http://www.math.luc.edu/~vande/jabglossary.html
>
>Without the book here that definition doesn't help me at all. Anyone?

Finally, a question that falls into my area of expertise (such as it is),=20
Lewis Carroll!

In the passage from _Peace_ you mention above, Weer is thinking about=20
nonexistant races of men. I don't have my book with me and so can't=20
remember the details, but from what you say above, it was the=20
orange-skinned people who worshiped sundials. The passage continues to the=20
effect that, after the threat of legal action allows the "orange tribe"=20
into the country club, "they out with strange oaths. What's a wabe?" (I am=20
reconstructing the quote from memory.)

The definition of wabe that helps here is not the one you quote above,=20
which is the one Carroll gave for the first[1] version of Jabberwocky, but=20
the one Humpty Dumpty gives in _Looking-Glass_:

----------------------
The grass plot round a sundial ... because it goes a long way before it,=20
and a long way behind it ... and a long way beyond it on each side.
-----------------------

This is word play. The sound of the word "way" is combined with the sound=20
of the common first letter of "before," "behind" and "beyond" to produce=20
the word "wabe." (My apologies to everyone who already understood this=20
perfectly.)

Because these people worship sundials, their oaths sometimes refer to=20
sundials or the plots of grass surrounding them, the wabes. (Naturally, as=20
sundial worshippers, they are familiar with Carroll's works, just as I=20
would expect them to be with Wolfe's.)

[1] The first stanza of Jabberwocky (in slightly different form) was=20
written by Lewis Carroll when he was still a boy, in a little private=20
periodical he created by hand for the entertainment of his siblings. He=20
referred to it as a "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry." Most interestingly,=20
Carroll provides a gloss of the poem, in which he defines some of his=20
invented words differently than he would later in  _Looking-Glass_.

The link below will take you to a page with a reproduction of the=20
hand-lettered poem.

<http://www.math.luc.edu/~vande/jaborigin.html>

William Ansley

--=20

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