Sir, - I am bemused by an item in the Dublin Theatre Guide in last Friday's Irish Times. Against details of the Peacock Theatre's production of Alice through the Looking Glass, the Irish Times reviewer judges the play to be "really quite brillig". The reference is to the opening lines of the poem Jabberwocky: " `Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe' ".
Alice had difficulty understanding this, and she asked Humpty Dumpty, who explained: "Brillig means four o'clock in the afternoon - the time when you begin broiling things for dinner". As Alice says, "The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things". Your reviewer evidently thinks you can. To write nonsense deliberately, as Lewis Carroll did, requires great mental discipline; to do so inadvertently is a great deal easier. - Yours, etc.,
Paul Griffin,
Glogue,
Pembrokeshire,
Wales.