| Term | Meaning | Origin | |------|---------|--------| | | Alice’s response to growing larger; nonstandard grammar for wonder. | Ch. 2 | | “Mad as a March hare” | Pre-existing English idiom, popularized by Carroll. | Ch. 7 | | “A grin without a cat” | The Cheshire Cat’s fading trick; the idea of an effect without a cause. | Ch. 8 | | “Frabjous” | A portmanteau of “fantastic” and “joyous”; used in the Jabberwocky slaying. | Looking-Glass | | “Callooh! Callay!” | Celebratory nonsense exclamations. | Looking-Glass | | “The thing that goes ‘snort-y’ ” | A creature in the Tulgey Wood with no real name. | Looking-Glass | | “They told me you had been to her…” | The opening of the Mad Hatter’s unsolvable riddle-song. | Ch. 7 |
Carroll, a mathematician and logician writing under a pen name, was deeply familiar with indexes. They were the backbone of the encyclopedic knowledge prized in the Victorian era—a culture obsessed with classification, from botanical taxonomies to the moral “ledger” of good and bad behavior. Alice herself embodies this orderly impulse. She constantly tries to recite her lessons (“How doth the little busy bee…”) and apply the rules of her drawing-room world. Her fall down the rabbit hole is a literal descent from the index of the known into the footnotes of the unconscious. Every encounter—the Caucus Race with no winner, the Queen’s croquet ground where the mallets are alive—mocks her attempts to find a system. An index would be her ultimate weapon; its impossibility is her ultimate defeat. index of alice in wonderland