Flosky!

May 7, 2026 by 4 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.

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