nonsense

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Nonsense (pronounced /ˈnɒnsəns/ (UK), /ˈnɒnsɛns/ (US)^[1]) is a verbal communication or written text that is spoken or written in a human language or other symbolic system but lacks any coherent meaning. Many poets, novelists and songwriters have used nonsense in their works, often creating entire works using it. It is also an important field of study in cryptography.

Literary nonsense

The phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" was coined by Noam Chomsky as an example of nonsense. The individual words make sense and are arranged according to proper grammatical rules, yet the result is nonsense. The inspiration for this attempt at creating verbal nonsense came from the idea of contradiction (for a start, how can a green idea be colorless?) and seemingly irrelevant and/or incompatible characteristics, which conspire to make the phrase meaningless. The phrase "the square root of Tuesday" operates on the latter principle. This principle is behind the inscrutability of the kōan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?", where one hand would presumably be insufficient for clapping without the intervention of another.

James Joyce’s final novel Finnegans Wake uses nonsense in a similar way: full of portmanteau words, it appears to be pregnant with multiple layers of meaning, but in many passages it is difficult to say whether any one person’s interpretation of a text could be the intended or correct one.

Jabberwocky, a poem (of nonsense verse) found in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll (1871), is generally considered to be one of the greatest nonsense poems written in the English language. The word jabberwocky is also occasionally used as a synonym of nonsense.

Nonsense verse

Nonsense verse is the verse form of literary nonsense, a genre that can manifest in many other ways. Its best-known exponent is Edward Lear, author of The Owl and the Pussycat and hundreds of limericks.

Nonsense verse is part of a long line of tradition predating Lear: the nursery rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle could also be termed a nonsense verse. There are also some works which appear to be nonsense verse, but actually are not, such as the popular 1940s song Mairzy Doats.

Lewis Carroll, seeking a nonsense riddle, once posed the question How is a raven like a writing desk?. Someone answered him, Because Poe wrote on both. However, there are other possible answers (e.g. both have inky quills).

Lines of nonsense frequently figure in the refrains of folksongs, where nonsense riddles and knock-knock jokes are often encountered.

Examples

The first verse of Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll;

The first four lines of On the Ning Nang Nong by Spike Milligan;^[2]

The first verse of Spirk Troll-Derisive by James Whitcomb Riley;^[3]

The first four lines of The Mayor of Scuttleton by Mary Mapes Dodge;^[3]

Cryptography

The problem of distinguishing sense from nonsense is important in cryptography and other intelligence fields. For example, they need to distinguish signal from noise. Cryptanalysts have devised algorithms for this purpose, to determine whether a given text is in fact nonsense or not. These algorithms typically analyze the presence of repetitions and redundancy in a text; in meaningful texts, certain frequently used words — for example, the, is and and in a text in the English language — will recur. A random scattering of letters, punctuation marks and spaces will not exhibit these regularities. Zipf's law attempts to state this analysis in the language of mathematics. By contrast, cryptographers typically seek to make their cipher texts resemble random distributions, to avoid telltale repetitions and patterns which may give an opening for cryptanalysis.

It is harder for cryptographers to deal with the presence or absence of meaning in a text in which the level of redundancy and repetition is higher than found in natural languages (for example, in the mysterious text of the Voynich manuscript).

Teaching machines to talk nonsense

Scientists have attempted to teach machines to produce nonsense. The Markov chain technique is one method which has been used to generate texts by algorithm and randomizing techniques that seem meaningful. Another method is sometimes called the Mad Libs method: it involves the creation of templates for various sentence structures, and filling in the blanks with noun phrases or verb phrases; these phrase-generation procedures can be looped to add recursion, giving the output the appearance of greater complexity and sophistication. Racter was a computer program which generated nonsense texts by this method; however, Racter’s book, The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed, proved to have been the product of heavy human editing of the program's output.

Technical Meaning in Wittgenstein

In Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings the word "Nonsense" carries special technical meaning which differs significantly from the normal use of the word. In this sense, "nonsense" does not refer to meaningless gibberish, rather the word refers to the lack of sense in the context of sense and reference. In this context, logical tautologies, and purely mathematical propositions may be regarded as "nonsense". For example, "1+1=2" is a nonsensical proposition.^[4]

It is important to note that here "nonsense" does not necessarily carry negative connotations. Indeed, Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus that the propositions contained in his own book should be regarded as nonsense.^[5]

See also

References

• Kahn, David, The Codebreakers (Scribner, 1996) ISBN 0-684-83130-9

1. ^ Wells, John C. (1990). Longman pronunciation dictionary. Harlow, England: Longman. p. 481. ISBN 0582053838.  entry "nonsense"
2. ^ Top poetry is complete nonsense
3. ^ ^{a b} A Nonsense Anthology collected by Carolyn Wells from Project Gutenberg
4. ^ http://books.google.com/books?id=md-KV6HUueUC&pg=PA110&lpg=PA110&dq=wittgenstein+tautology+nonsense&source=bl&ots=LW3W5QzMH6&sig=NcIHciHn24mGhXUAvhIISY_062E&hl=en&ei=plziSdC7LOfqlQeIurDgDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3
5. ^ Biletzki, Anat and Anat Matar, "Ludwig Wittgenstein", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 Edition) "The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"