This week’s theme
Book titles that became words

This week’s words
brave new world
deipnosophist
Lord of the Flies
Hudibrastic
Alice in Wonderland


Wordsmith Games

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(AL-is in WUHN-duhr-land)

MEANING:

noun: An absurd, illogical, or fantastical situation.
adjective: Absurd, dreamlike, fantastical, or illogical.

ETYMOLOGY:

After Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), a children’s novel by Lewis Carroll. Earliest documented use: 1874.

NOTES:

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice follows a rabbit down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, where she meets talking animals, vanishing cats, mad tea-partiers, murderous monarchs, and more.

When dealing with an Alice-in-Wonderland scenario, trying to apply logic will only make you mad as a hatter. Best to just embrace the absurdity before you lose your head over the details.

Another word coined after the book is Alician. Also see rabbit hole, a phrase Carroll did not coin literally, but one whose figurative life owes much to Alice’s tumble.

For words coined in the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, see here. Also see micropsia, aka Alice in Wonderland syndrome.

USAGE:

“A huge instant bureaucracy was set up inside the walls of Saddam’s former Republican Palace, where Americans laboriously laid plans for undertakings ranging from the design of a new Iraqi flag to the restructuring of the Iraqi monetary system. Meanwhile, no coherent, unified plan to fight the insurgency emerged, which rendered such plans increasingly abstract. ‘It was Alice in Wonderland,’ recalled Gary Anderson, a defense specialist who was dispatched to Iraq by Paul Wolfowitz to help set up an Iraqi civil-defense corps. ‘It was surreal. I mean, I was so depressed the second time we went there, to see the lack of progress and the continuing confusion. The lack of coherence. You’d get two separate briefs, two separate cuts on the same subject, from the military and from the civilians.’”
Peter J. Boyer; Downfall; The New Yorker; Nov 20, 2006.

“The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of Vladimir Putin’s invasion -- the bogus claims of Ukrainian Nazism, of ‘liberating’ Russian-speaking Ukrainians, of ‘high-precision’ missiles that end up killing civilians in shopping centres -- makes recovery complicated for many people.”
Ukraine Is on the Edge of Nervous Breakdown; The Economist (London, UK); Aug 6, 2022.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: