'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves


Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;


All mimsy were the borogoves,


And the mome raths outgrabe.

This little piece of nonsense is from the poem Jabberwocky, by 19th Century author Lewis Carroll. It featured in his book Through the Looking Glass, the adventures of little girl Alice after she had completed her time in Wonderland. The poem is about someone going on a quest and killing a monster, but it is full of strange words. The first verse, quoted above, is particularly hard to understand: about half the words in it are invented.

Alice eventually meets Humpty Dumpty, who claims to be an expert on obscure words. Between them, they work out the meaning of the verse. The 'wabe' is the grass plot around the sundial, called that because it goes 'a long way before it, and a long way behind it - and a long way beyond it on each side'. The toves, borogoves and raths are various small animals wandering around the grass plot. Toves, for example, look like badgers with corkscrews on their noses.

Designing a Sundial

I've always been interested in sundials. I remember trying to make one during boring lessons in school by marking out the shadow of the window frame on my desk at various times, but I could never get it to work. I looked into the matter and built a small sundial for the garden. I found that the piece of the sundial which casts the shadow is called the gnomon. Ideally, the gnomon should be aligned so that it is parallel to the axis of the earth. Since I live at 52.5° North, the gnomon should be at an angle of 52.5° to the base. This immediately rules out most shop-bought sundials where the gnomon is at some arbitrary angle more to do with aesthetics than accuracy of timekeeping. I built my sundial out of wood, and I measured my angles carefully.

Aligning a sundial

I now had the problem of pointing the gnomon north. One way is to use a compass, but compasses don't point to the true north pole, they point to the 'magnetic north pole' which is in a different place. There are corrections that can be made, but I didn't like the sound of them, so I devised a different method. Since the gnomon points north and is parallel to the axis of the earth, it will point to Polaris, the North Star. All I had to do was go out on a clear night and look along the edge of the gnomon, aligning it to the North Star. Easier said than done! I'm short-sighted: with my glasses on, I couldn't get my eye up to the edge for a clear line of sight; with my glasses off, I couldn't see the star. Eventually, however, I got it sorted out and my sundial turned out to be reasonably accurate.

Sundials and History

Looking into the history of sundials, I find that while they were invented in ancient times, they actually weren't very popular. There was a huge one in Rome - using an Egyptian obelisk as the gnomon and with marks laid out on the ground - but most people got by without knowing the exact time. For timing intervals, hourglasses or water clocks (using dripping water instead of falling sand) were more practical. Greek law courts had an interesting variant on justice: each set of lawyers was allowed to speak for a fixed amount of time. A professional 'clock watcher' kept an eye on the water clock and cut the speaker off in mid sentence when the time had elapsed.

Really accurate sundials only really took off in the 18th Century, and their development was triggered by the invention of various types of mechanical clock. They needed the sundials to check on the accuracy of the clocks.

The Wabe

I've always liked the idea of unusual animals snuffling around the base of the sundial. The sundial is in the middle, at the centre of things. The gnomon is the centre of the sundial. Being parallel to the earth's axis, you could say that in a relative sense the world revolves around it. The gnomon shows the time by casting the shadow. I love the fact that 'gnomon' is an unusual word, in ancient Greek, and starting with a 'gn' like Gnasher in the Beano comic (or was it the Dandy?).

So when I was looking for an internet name for myself, I picked Gnomon. Long before I came across h2g2, I was working on Gnomon's Guide to the Galaxy. A bonus is that it sounds like 'Know man' - I pride myself on knowing unusual things. A further bonus is that months later when I looked up the origins of the word 'gnomon', it turns out that it actually means 'the one who knows' in Ancient Greek.

So I've decided to call my articles for the Post 'Notes from Around the Sundial'. The sundial is there at all hours of the day and night, sees the moon and the stars as well as the sun, and provides useful information when people take the trouble to consult it. You may find stellar alignments here, or small animals resembling badgers. There may be a strange inscription in an obscure language on the sundial. Or perhaps I'm sitting beside the sundial, reading a new book. Time will tell.

Postscript

Incidentally, an alternative and far more sinister explanation for the nonsense verse is given in the excellent short story 'Mimsy Were the Borogoves' by Lewis Padgett¹, which is available in many science fiction short story collections. I won't give away the plot, but it involves two children finding a strange box of toys which teach them to think about the world in a different way.

It was made into a movie called 'The Last Mimzy', which I've just received in the post on DVD. I'm not expecting anything great, but I'll let you know.

Gnomon

19.06.08 Front Page

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