Nonsense

For other uses, see Nonsense (disambiguation).

Nonsense (pronounced \ˈnän-ˌsen(t)s, ˈnän(t)-sən(t)s\) is a verbal communication or written text which resembles a human language or other symbolic system, but which lacks any coherent meaning.

In philosophy, nonsense refers to a group of statements which cannot carry sense in the context of sense and reference. Logical truths such as "it's either raining or not raining" and mathematical propositions such as "1+1=2" are regarded as "nonsense".

Technical Meaning in Analytic Philosophy

In analytic philosophy word "Nonsense" carries special technical meaning which differs significantly from the normal use of the word.

In the context analytic philosophy "nonsense" does not refer to meaningless gibberish, "nonsense" simply 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.

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.

"Nonsense, as opposed to senselessness, is encountered when a proposition is even more radically devoid of meaning, when it transcends the bounds of sense. Under the label of unsinnig can be found various propositions: "Socrates is identical", but also "1 is a number". While some nonsensical propositions are blatantly so, others seem to be meaningful — and only analysis carried out in accordance with the picture theory can expose their nonsensicality. Since only what is "in" the world can be described, anything that is "higher" is excluded, including the notion of limit and the limit points themselves. Traditional metaphysics, and the propositions of ethics and aesthetics, which try to capture the world as a whole, are also excluded, as is the truth in solipsism, the very notion of a subject, for it is also not "in" the world but at its limit."

Distinguishing sense from nonsense

While Emily Dickinson wrote that:

Much madness is divinest Sense

To the discerning Eye…

...the problem lies in the discernment. Distinguishing meaningful utterances from nonsense is not a trivial task. Confronted with a lengthy text in an unknown script, how does one determine whether those characters in fact contained a meaningful text, or were simply set using the equivalent of printer's pi or a lorem ipsum-style text?

The problem is important in cryptography and other intelligence fields, where it is important 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 frequently 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.

Teaching machines to talk nonsense

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). Some have attempted to create text which carries no meaning, but still complies with the regularities predicted by Zipf's law. The Markov chain technique is one such method, and it has occasionally been used in surrealistic jokes.

The Markov chain technique is one method which has been used to generate texts by algorithm and randomizing techniques that seem meaningful. Another could be 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.

Literary nonsense

Main article: 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.

Still, the human will to find meaning is strong; green ideas might be ideas associated with a green political party, and colorless green ideas could describe them as lacking in color, or defeated and uninspiring. For some, the human impulse to find meaning in what is actually random or nonsensical is what makes people find luck in coincidence, believe in omens and divination or engage in conversation with a computer (see ELIZA effect).

The dreamlike language of James Joyce’s final novel Finnegans Wake sheds light on 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. Nonsense verse represents a long tradition; its best-known exponent is Edward Lear, author of The Owl and the Pussycat and hundreds of limericks.

Nonsense verse comes from a tradition older than Lear: the nursery rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle is also a sort of nonsense verse. There are also some things which appear to be nonsense verse, but actually are not, such as the popular 1940s song Mairzy Doats.

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

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;

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;

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;

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;

See also

• Asemic writing
• Bollocks
• Bullshit
• Dada, nonsense as art
• Discordianism
• Fiction
• Gibberish
• Gobbledygook
• Humor

• Language game
• Logorrhoea, an excessively wordy style of abstract prose lacking concrete meaning, i.e. nonsense
• Mojibake, random nonsense characters generated by foreign text
• Nonce word
• Schizophasia
• Sokal affair
• Tall tale
• Vacuous truth
• Wit

References

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