Word: boojum
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...July 18, 1874, a shy Oxford don visited his sisters at Guildford, in the south of England. There, part of a poem came to mind. It was only eight words long, but the phrase would haunt generations: "For the Snark was a Boojum, you see." Charles Dodgson subtitled his completed work "An Agony in Eight Fits," but it is really the final volume of an unintended trilogy, a trip to Wonderland without Alice...
...Snark is, in Paul Tillich's fashionable phrase, every man's ultimate concern. This is the great search motif of the poem, the quest for an ultimate good. But this motif is submerged in a stronger motif, the dread, the agonizing dread, of ultimate failure. The Boojum is more than death. It is the end of all searching. It is final, absolute extinction, in Auden's phrase, 'the dreadful Boojum of Nothingness...
...Snark is, in Paul Tillich's fashionable phrase, every man's ultimate concern. This is the great search motif of the poem, the quest for an ultimate good. But this motif is submerged in a stronger motif, the dread, the agonizing dread, of ultimate failure. The Boojum is more than death. It is the end of all searching. It is final, absolute extinction, in Auden's phrase, 'the dreadful Boojum of Nothingness...
While racketeers have long been siphoning surplus income into legitimate business, such investments are as tricky to pin down as the boojum. Last week the Chicago Crime Commission published some results of its investigation in a directory that might be called Hood's Who. The pamphlet not only lists the names and addresses of 13 Mafia chieftains and 214 lieutenants, but also identifies 42 firms said to be either owned by the mob or affiliated with...
...portmanteau word, combining snake and shark, invented by Lewis Carroll for the ineluctable prey of his poem, "The Hunting of the Snark." One variety-the Boojum-had the power to make its hunter "softly and suddenly vanish away...