Flosky!

May 7, 2026 by 13 Comments

Via Laudator Temporis Acti:

Letter of Edward Lear to Evelyn Baring:

Thrippsy pillivinx,

Inky tinky pobblebockle abblesquabs? — Flosky! beebul trimble flosky! — Okul scratchabibblebongibo, viddle squibble tog-a-tog, ferrymoyassity amsky flamsky ramsky damsky crocklefether squiggs.

Flinkywisty pomm,
Slushypipp.

Beebul trimble flosky indeed! You can see the autograph letter at the link. It must have been fun to be a friend of Lear’s.

Comments

  1. cuchuflete says
    May 7, 2026 at 10:17 pm

    I haven’t a clue. So I went hunting. Found this:
    “ These are the words of Edward Lear in a letter to his friend Evelyn Baring. They are also the first of Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s book The Violence of language in which he explains that all linguistic and semantic studies fail in their attempt to decipher the letter. Linguistic studies, like many analytical sciences, don’t like ambiguity. Phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, none of those safe and established Saussurean probes can make sense of the words on the page, yet Lecercle eventually manages to make sense of what looks like words and sentences. He goes looking for meaning in various interpretations of his own, through connotations instead of denotations, though he concedes the method itself leads to results that remain unstable; Flinkywisty pomm for instance could mean Best Wishes just as well as it might Go to Hell! ”
    source: https://conversations.aaschool.ac.uk/caroline-rabourdin/

  2. languagehat says
    May 7, 2026 at 10:22 pm

    It doesn’t get more French than that.

  3. Jerry Friedman says
    May 7, 2026 at 10:34 pm

    It must have been fun to be a friend of Lear’s.

    I believe his friends often exclaimed, “How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!”

  4. Y says
    May 7, 2026 at 11:26 pm

    Evelyn Baring doesn’t strike me a fun light-hearted sort, but he was friends enough with Lear to get sent this postcard.

  5. Mike Chisholm says
    May 8, 2026 at 6:00 am

    Hmm. I would never describe myself as a humourless person (but then who would?) but I can well imagine the frustration of opening a letter with great anticipation — it’s from Eddie! Hey, maybe some of his hilarious drawings and limericks! — only to find this meaningless effusion of Victorian nursery-grade whimsy… Poopy poo!

  6. mollymooly says
    May 8, 2026 at 7:52 am

    Oh, now, it’s a good one-shot joke. A second such missive would indeed be annoying.

  7. languagehat says
    May 8, 2026 at 8:34 am

    Exactly. (Though I wouldn’t put it past Lear to have kept on sending them.)

  8. Jerry Packard says
    May 8, 2026 at 9:03 am

    If you look simply at vowels you get certain regularities. For example, there are very few diphthongs. Other than that you get a nice succession – and repetition – of vowel height and backness values. He plays with the orthography as well, enamored with V and C gemination. The morphology and syntax are quite regular – if only confabulated, but the most remarkable characteristic to me (aside from the obvious ‘letter’ structure) is the completely coherent (to me) intonational pattern matching the letter structure. It strikes me as very Lewis Carroll-esque.

  9. Jerry Friedman says
    May 8, 2026 at 9:25 am

    Bizarre monosyllable shortage, however.

  10. D.O. says
    May 8, 2026 at 9:51 am

    And notice, not a single article. They are useless. Case closed.

  11. Jerry Friedman says
    May 8, 2026 at 9:57 am

    How do you know “pobblebockle” isn’t an article?

    Incidentally, that’s a reminiscence of “The Pobble Who Has no Toes”, like the reminiscence of “The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo” in the next line. Those familiar with Lear’s oeuvre may find other connections and maybe even clues to meaning—OK, never mind that last.

  12. David Eddyshaw says
    May 10, 2026 at 8:14 pm

    The article is obviously the enclitic -y. Lear confuses matters by writing it solid with its phonological host word.

  13. Jerry Friedman says
    May 10, 2026 at 8:52 pm

    Of course! The next task is to determine why the enclitic /əl/ is sometimes spelled -Cle and sometimes -ul. After that, maybe what it means.

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