Imagining jabberwocks in The Lodge

Is it just me or is it somehow comforting to think of an albo in The Lodge, but alarming to think of it being the haunt, perhaps the dark cave, of the nation's prime jabberwock?

I ask this because having always found Anthony Albanese's pet name "Albo" strangely endearing, I now find this word-sound association phenomenon thoughtfully discussed in a bewitching new piece in Discover magazine.

"Some words sound like what they mean," David Adam alerts us in his piece How Names And Words Shape The Way We Perceive People And Things.

His essay has had special piquancy for your columnist with a new grandchild soon to be born and needing a name. The looming bub's parents dutifully asked for my suggestions. In his piece Adam discusses the sounds and shapes of the names we give children.

Intuitively sensing the coming babe was a girl (the parents had chosen not to find out its sex) and strongly feminist in my inclinations I suggested Xena or Boadicea. Both names sound strangely appropriate for the famous warrior women who wore them.

But back to David Adam, who muses, "I love the word discombobulated ... Just trying to utter it aloud perfectly encapsulates its meaning (confused and disconcerted)."

"[Then] the words 'pop' and 'murmur' sound like they, well, sound. Try to shout the word whisper. Weird, right?

"Such onomatopoeic terms demonstrate what researchers call sound iconicity, or a resemblance between a word's form and meaning. In a unique 2019 study, psychologists tested how volunteers interpreted the meaning of nonsense words. They asked the volunteers to attribute characteristics to and draw pictures of imaginary creatures, such as a horgous, a keex, a bomburg and a cougzer.

"The psychologists presented adjectives - round, spiky, large, small, masculine and feminine - that the volunteers had to match with 24 nonsense words. The scientists then picked the top 12 words that got the most consistent and unique descriptions. Most people rated an ackie and gricker as small, an ambous as round, an axittic and cruckwic as sharp and a heonia as feminine."

Beyond the quirky experiment, these findings have far-reaching implications for human interaction. Maybe you're a soon-to-be parent choosing a baby name.

If people expect a horgous to be big and a keex to be small, what does that mean for every Pam, Dick or Harry? Could our names influence the way people view and behave towards us?

"Yes, says Penny Pexman, a psychologist at the University of Calgary in Canada. In a series of studies she has shown we tend to expect people to have specific character traits based on how their name sounds. People associate the "round" sounds in people's names with one set of characteristics, and names featuring "sharp" sounds with a very different set.

Somehow Anthony Albanese's "Anthony" seems, like his Albo, suggestive of "round" sounds (as well, for me, in the name/word Anthony I can hear soft lute music being played) and whatever characteristics "round" sounds bring to mind.

I find that when in news and commentary he is called "Albo" (my drawing of an albo depicts a round, amiable grazing creature, a herbivore part downy flightless albatross, part teddy bear) Mr Albanese the man somehow takes on a kind of hard-to-define cuddly lustre he somehow doesn't have when he's only spoken of as Mr Albanese.

By contrast (can this have more to do with my political leanings than with iconicity? - no, of course not) our prime minister's Scott and Scotty, as in "Scotty from Marketing", has hard, jagged, staccato, carnivorous associations, very like what Lewis Carroll knew the mind would conjure from the sound of the name jabberwock.

"Beware the jabberwock" Carroll warns us in his highly sensible nonsense poem, knowing that the jabberwock's name already has the poem's readers primed for fight or flight.

Meanwhile my grandchild turns out, bless him, to be a boy. Although it would be character-buildingly challenging for him to go through life with the name Boadicea I have urged his parents to call him something else.

One senses that our babies born into these jabberwocky times and out into this planet jabberwocked by climate catastrophes will already have lifetimes of challenges enough.