Immigration and Customs Officer: Have you any personal articles of clothing?
A Baker resembling Lewis Carroll: I don't know.
Immigration and Customs Officer: Have you any luggage or packages?
A Baker resembling Lewis Carroll: I don't know.
Immigration and Customs Officer: Can you state your own name?
A Baker resembling Lewis Carroll: I don't know.
Immigration and Customs Officer: Can you make bridecake?
A Baker resembling Lewis Carroll: I don't know.
Immigration and Customs Officer: Do you not know whether you can make bridecake or are you simply unable to procure the materials to do so?
A Baker resembling Lewis Carroll: I don't know.
Immigration and Customs Officer: You can't be serious, what does all this mean?
A Baker resembling Lewis Carroll: I don't know.
Note that the Baker consistently eschews the binary either-or of conventional logic upon which his interlocutor is depending, resorting instead to the triunary-based logic of "I don't know". We have already seen how the principle of threes supersedes all other logical statements (what I tell you three times is true) aboard the HMS Snark. Thus, the Baker disposes of the boojum of binary Marxist dialectical materialism, its frumious one-two is slain by his manxome one-two-three! Huzzah! The vorpal blade of the trinitarian Snarkist trialectic immaterialism goes snicker-snack! Oh, there's a PhD dissertation somewhere in all of this — oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Put a sock in it, Wittgenstein, we're talking snark here!
I submit for your perusal the word uffish in the above lines. Lewis Carroll explained it thus: "it (uffish) seemed to suggest a state ...
-
We're frolicking through yet another exegesis of my Snark GN … deep in the anapestic bowels of Fit the Second … We have arrived now at ...
-
Oh, you silly, mad, impetuous boy of a Bellman, of course you’ve heard it before! Your sense of exactitude may be lacking but as we shall de...
-
Martin Gardner, in his indispensible Annotated Snark, cites Eric Partridge’s assertion that the Baker’s use of antediluvian is "one o...
No comments:
Post a Comment