: 28 March 2002 :

Heheheh. I just read the latest entry from lady4eyes, whose diary is consistently great.

The person who found her diary while looking for a definition of “frabjous” reminded me of a class I had when I was at college a couple of years ago. It was a basic class on rhetoric and debate, and one of the things we had as homework was a sheet of quotations from various places, paragraphs from newspaper comment columns and whatnot, although there wasn't anything to say where they all came from. We had to analyse the language and the construction of the argument, all that sort of thing. I did most of them fine, until I got to the last one, which was a speech by the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland. I think it was the bit about the treacle-well.

When it came to the class, I said I'd not answered the last one because it was a trick question. “You can't analyse the logic of a passage from Lewis Carroll,” I said, “you'd be missing the point.” The look on the teacher's face seemed to suggest that she hadn't really meant it as a trick question. Hmmm.

I remember the first time I heard the Mad Hatter's tea party, when I was small and my dad was reading it to me.

“But they were in the well,” Alice said.
“Of course they were,” replied the Mad Hatter, “well in.”

Heheheh.