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nonsense

 
Dictionary: non·sense   (nŏn'sĕns', -səns) pronunciation
n.
  1. Words or signs having no intelligible meaning: a message that was nonsense until decoded.
  2. Subject matter, behavior, or language that is foolish or absurd.
  3. Extravagant foolishness or frivolity: a clown's exuberant nonsense.
  4. Matter of little or no importance or usefulness: a chatty letter full of gossip and nonsense.
  5. Insolent talk or behavior; impudence: wouldn't take any nonsense from the children.
adj.
Genetics. Of or relating to a mutation in a structural gene that changes a nucleotide triplet into a stop codon, thus prematurely terminating the polypeptide chain during protein synthesis.

interj.
Used to express disagreement or exasperation.


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Antonyms: nonsense
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n

Definition: craziness, ridiculousness
Antonyms: clarity, common sense, fact, intelligibility, sense, truth, understanding, wisdom


Devil's Dictionary: nonsense
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A cynical view of the world by Ambrose Bierce


n.

The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary.


Word Tutor: nonsense
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pronunciation

IN BRIEF: n. - Ornamental objects of no great value; A message that seems to convey no meaning.

pronunciation Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense. — Robert Frost

Quotes About: Nonsense
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Quotes:

"Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter." - Sir Max Beerbohm

"Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they can talk sense." - Robert Frost

"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put on the troubled seas of thought." - John Kenneth Galbraith

"Don't talk to me about a man's being able to talk sense; everyone can talk sense. Can he talk nonsense?" - William Pitt

"Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited." - George Santayana

Wikipedia: 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.

Contents

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;

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

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

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!
There's a Nong Nang Ning

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

The Crankadox leaned o'er the edge of the moon,
And wistfully gazed on the sea
Where the Gryxabodill madly whistled a tune
To the air of "Ti-fol-de-ding-dee."

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

The Mayor of Scuttleton burned his nose
Trying to warm his copper toes;
He lost his money and spoiled his will
By signing his name with an icicle quill;

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

  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"

Translations: Nonsense
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Dansk (Danish)
n. - vrøvl, vås, pjat, meningsløshed

idioms:

  • make a nonsense of    gøre det meningsløst

Nederlands (Dutch)
onzin, dwaasheid, onbeduidendheid, brutaliteit, nonsens-

Français (French)
n. - absurdités, balivernes, histoires, bêtises, petit rien

idioms:

  • make a nonsense of    être en totale contradiction avec

Deutsch (German)
n. - Unsinn

idioms:

  • make a nonsense of    ad absurdum führen, unsinnig machen

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ανοησίες, βλακείες, κουταμάρες, παραλογισμός

idioms:

  • make a nonsense of    γελοιοποιώ, αποδεικνύω τη ματαιότητα

Italiano (Italian)
sciocchezza, stupidaggine

idioms:

  • make a nonsense of    rovinare

Português (Portuguese)
n. - absurdo (m)

idioms:

  • make a nonsense of    fazer confusão de

Русский (Russian)
бессмыслица, чушь

idioms:

  • make a nonsense of    полностью противоречить

Español (Spanish)
n. - tonterías, disparates

idioms:

  • make a nonsense of    hacer un absurdo de

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - nonsens, strunt, dumheter

中文(简体)(Chinese (Simplified))
无意义的事, 荒唐, 荒谬的言行

idioms:

  • make a nonsense of    使杂乱不堪, 搅乱

中文(繁體)(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 無意義的事, 荒唐, 荒謬的言行

idioms:

  • make a nonsense of    使雜亂不堪, 攪亂

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 무의미한 말, 시시한 것

idioms:

  • make a nonsense of    ~을 망쳐놓다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 無意味なことば, 戯言, がらくた
adj. - 無意味な

idioms:

  • make a nonsense of    ぶちこわしにする

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) هراء‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮דברים בלתי-הגיוניים או בלתי-אפשריים, הבלים, שטויות‬


 
 
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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Thesaurus. Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary Copyright © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Answers Corporation Antonyms. © 1999-2009 by Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Devil's Dictionary. Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, 1911  Read more
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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Nonsense" Read more
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