'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

'Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!'

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought--
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Jabberwocky", by Lewis Carroll.
Originally written in 1855 for "Mischmasch", his family periodical.
It was published to the wider world in his 1871 novel "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There", the sequel to 1865's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

fun fact: the original was listed as a "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon poetry" and mimmicked a middle-english abbreviation that can't even be done in unicode: it was a þ combined with a superscript e, as a way to write "the" in one symbol.
Not able to do that, he wrote it "yᵉ"

That symbol, btw:

hang on, I'm frantically dialing the unicode consortium

It's been pointed out there's a combining superscript e, so you can just make your own:
yͤ

and keep in mind:
that's not "EY" and it's not even "YE".
We're using "y" here as a shortcut for þ, which is pronounced as "th", so yͤ is just "the"

Which means, yes, every time you've seen a "ye olde shoppe", you don't say "yee".
You just say "the".

þ was an Old English letter that made it into some dialects of Middle English. It's called the Thorn, and comes from the Elder Futhark rune ᚦ (Þurs, or Thurs)

Basically over the middle english/early modern english period it slowly morphed into the diagraph "th", and it was often written as a "y" because of a similar-looking old english letter, wynn: Ƿ

this, by the way, is why english has a "th" sound that you have to know to pronounce as "th" and not just T and H.
Tuh-huh is not how you pronounce "th", you say something like "Thuh"... because it originally wasn't "t" or "h", it was þ.

BTW, the "ye" of "ye olde shoppe" (which is just "the") is completely nominative second purson plural pronoun, "ye".
Yeah, that's confusing.
Basically, it was the informal middle/early-modern version of "y'all"

early modern english used the (nominative) first person pronouns "I" & "We" (for singular and plural) and for 3rd person, "he/she/it" and "they", very similarly to modern english (though a singular they was added later).
but second person was more complicated.

for modern english we have the second person singular of "you", and for plurals we have, well, "you".
Although lots of dialects still have a separate second person singular: These are your "y'alls", "You'uns", "yinz", and "Youse"

Early Modern English instead had "thou" for the singular informal 2nd person, and "ye" and "you" were both used as the plural AND the formal singular.

to translate to modern english, it's like you'd say "you" to a friend, "y'all" to a group of people, but if you're talking to your boss, you'd used "y'all" instead of "you"

This goes back to a thing called the T–V distinction, which is how some languages modify their pronouns based on familiarity, age, politeness, etc.

It's named from how Latin has "tu" and "vos", which were the singular and plural form of "you", and the Romanced started using "vos" for emperors (and later, Popes) even though they're just one guy, not a group, so normally plurals wouldn't make sense.

English actually has done a full 180 on this issue:
Old English and Early Middle English used "thou" and "ye" solely for singular vs. plural.
Then sometime around the 13th century, "ye"/"you" started becoming the formal version, probably because of Norman French influence.

Then by the 17th century, English had mostly gotten rid of the distinction, so it was back to just using thou vs. ye/you for singular vs. plural.

So English started without a T-V distinction, developed one, and then held onto it for a few centuries before getting rid of it again.

English has a lot of weird baggage that just dates back to who invaded/ruled/influenced the British isles and when.

my favorite example is about food and shit.
Ever notice how we have two sets of words for many animals and their meet?
Is it Cow, or Beef? Sheep, or Mutton? Pig, or Pork?
And after eating, do you excrete feces or do you TAKE A SHIT?

and the answer for why one of these is animal and the other is food is also the same reason for why one of these terms is polite and formal and why the other one is crass.

old english classism!

English comes from a dual background of Anglo-Saxons and Normans, thanks to the Norman conquest.
The Anglo-saxons came from Germanic tribes, and spoke Germanic languages.
The Normans spoke Norman French, Latin, and Old Norse.

After the Norman conquest, the Normans were the nobility. They were the rich people, and all the Anglo-Saxons were peasants. And they both spoke different languages, with the church in their as a wild card who mainly used Latin.

All their their languages evolved and merged together to become what we now call English, but they still have linguistic roots to the different groups of people who spoke them.

So the peasants who took care of the animals called them COWS and PIGS and SHEEP, which are all words with Germanic (through Anglo-saxon) origins.
The aristocrats, who only saw those animals once they'd been cooked and put on a plate, called them "beef" and "pork" and "mutton"

and where do those words come from?
latin, through old french.

and the thing with "shit" vs. "feces" and "fucking" vs "copulating" is the same sort of thing.
One of those is polite and the other is crude, and it's because of classism between the norman aristocracy and the anglo-saxon peasantry.

"shit" & "fuck" come from germanic roots, so that's what the anglo-saxon peasants would use.
"feces" and "copulation" have latin roots, so that's what the aristocracy would use.

They mean the same thing. There's not any inherent politeness or crudeness to either: it's just how English has the embedded context of an invasion that happened about a thousand years ago.

and it's interesting because while english no longer has familiarity built into our pronouns, we kinda still do build it into some of our nouns.

like if you had a nasty infection, would you go to the doctor and say "I fucked this person the other day, and then today I'm pissing blood!"
or would you say "I had sex with this person the other day, and today I found blood in my urine"

(That one's actually a different thing: both "piss" and "urine" are latin through old french, but "piss" means "urine" and "urine" means "water". It's euphemism, not a different-language-classism thing)

QI mentioned this once when they pointed out there's no word for the thing you shit into that's not a vulgar name like "shitter" or "crapper", because "toilet" comes from french and came to mean "a wet cloth". It's just a euphemism.

The other names are like "bathroom", which means the room, and we're not talking about the bathing, which gets sillier when you realize we call bathrooms bathrooms even when they don't have a bathtub.

Similarly, "restroom". You're not resting, you're shitting.
Latrine & Lavatory both come from latin "lavare", to wash. So it means basically "wash room".

"privy" comes from old french "prive", meaning privacy.
So it's a private room.
"Commode" goes back to a french word meaning "convenient", because it first referred to a sort of chamber pot on wheels.

then you've got names like "water closet" which get closer, but still refer to the room.
Similarly things like "men's room/women's room/little boy's room/little girl's room".
Is it the place you go to have gender? That's not how it works.

The etymologies of both "john" and "loo" are debated and unconfirmed, though most of the suggestions are euphemisms.

fun fact: Bears are also named this way.
proto-indo-european called them "the brown one" to avoid using their real name.

they're that brown animal. don't say their name. they're just the brown one.

the related funny etymology is that the artic circle named that from artkos, which is the ancient greek word for bear.
it's the bear circle. it's the circle with bears in it.

and the antarctic circle?
well, that's clearly the circle without bears.

reason #349 why the aliens are gonna think we're weird and stupid:
we named the two poles of our planet after whether they have bears or not

that's not gonna be our most infamous Bad Name, though.
I still think they're gonna be mad that we named the Milky Way Galaxy after milk, twice. https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1019870230787440640