Why Does Nonsense Still Make Sense? Grammar Without Meaning
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A poem full of invented words can still be followed, because the grammar tells you what kind of thing each word must be. That gap between structure and meaning is what the form plays with and what linguists study.
How it works at all
A reader encountering an invented word in a well-formed sentence can tell a great deal about it without knowing what it means. The position tells you whether it is a thing, an action or a description. The endings tell you whether it is plural, past or comparative. The words around it tell you whether it is something that can be done to something else. All of that comes from the structure rather than from the vocabulary, and the demonstration is that a passage of complete invention can be paraphrased, questioned and even translated. The form therefore isolates grammar from meaning and shows that the two are separable, which is a genuine finding about language dressed up as entertainment for children.
The devices it uses
The tradition draws on a recognisable set of techniques:
- •Invented words that follow the sound patterns of the language and therefore feel possible
- •Blends of two existing words, which Carroll called portmanteau words and explained in the text itself
- •Real grammar carrying unreal content, which is the core device
- •Logical form applied to absurd premises, producing arguments that are valid and nonsensical
- •Literalism, where a figure of speech is taken at face value and followed to its conclusion
- •Precise absurdity, where impossible things are described with excessive specificity
Where it came from
The English tradition has a documented history and specific practitioners. Edward Lear published his first collection of limericks in 1846, drawn from verses written to amuse children, and established the form's association with drawings and with a particular gentle absurdity. Lewis Carroll's work in the 1860s and 1870s took it further by combining invention with formal logic, which was his professional subject, so that the nonsense in his books frequently consists of correct reasoning from impossible premises. Behind both lie much older sources, including nursery rhymes whose meaning has been lost or was never present, the deliberate absurdity of medieval festival, and folk traditions of impossible songs found across Europe. The tradition continued through Belloc, Lear's imitators, Spike Milligan and a great deal of modern children's writing.
Translating it
Rendering invented words in another language is a problem that reveals what the original is doing. A translator cannot look the words up, so the task is to work out what each one suggests through its sound and its resemblance to real words, and then to build a new word in the target language producing a comparable suggestion, which means writing rather than translating. Carroll's most famous poem has been translated into dozens of languages by exactly this method, with the results diverging enormously and several being celebrated as achievements in their own right. Where the original explains its invented words in the text, the translation must invent words the same explanation will fit. The comparison of multiple translations of the same nonsense passage has become a standard teaching case in translation studies, since it isolates the creative element that ordinary translation obscures.
Why linguists borrowed it
The technique became a research tool because it isolates variables that are otherwise impossible to separate. Constructing a grammatically perfect sentence that means nothing demonstrates that grammatical well-formedness is independent of sense, which was the point of Chomsky's famous example about colourless green ideas and which has been debated ever since by people arguing that the sentence does mean something after all. Testing children with invented words establishes whether they have learned a grammatical rule or merely memorised forms, which is what the classic experiment asking children to pluralise a nonsense creature was designed to show, and it demonstrated that very young children apply rules productively. Nonsense words are used in memory research to control for prior familiarity, in reading assessment to test decoding rather than recognition, and in studies of how the brain processes structure.
The takeaway
Grammar tells a reader what kind of thing each invented word must be, which is why a passage of complete invention can still be paraphrased and questioned. The form therefore separates structure from meaning, which is a real finding about language. Linguists borrowed the technique to test whether children have learned rules or memorised forms, and to control for familiarity in memory research.