The Last Mimzy part 6:  what's in a name?

The Alice Mimzy discussed last time, that is, the one supposed to be the inspiration of Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, may have had major or minor impact on those stories, but it apparently made one significant change:  it gave its name to the nonsense vocabulary that comprises the poem Jabberwocky:

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimzy were the borogroves
And the mome raths outgrabe.As far as we knew, Lewis Carroll invented this word, and several others, as part of illustrating a peculiar feature of analytic language, that words which are completely unfamiliar can be given a sense of meaning by connecting them syntactically with known structures.  As Alice says of the complete poem, "It puts thoughts in my head, but I don't know what they are."  It creates the illusion of meaning, and that illusion is so compelling we believe we know the story being told despite the fact that we don't know so many of the words used to tell it.  One of those words is mimzy.

That raises the question, though, as to why the rabbit, or the box sent from the future, is called a mimzy.  If the word has meaning as a noun or even as a name, that meaning must trace back to Carroll's use of it as an adjective describing the condition or state of the borogroves in that poem.  Yet if Carroll himself got the word from Alice's Mimzy, then there is a loop created, in which the Mimzy is called that because of the poem and the poem uses that word because of the Mimzy.

It is not too difficult to resolve this as a matter of temporal anomalies.  It is the one form of predestination paradox that works most easily, in which the original source of information is replaced by a new source but remains within the loop.  In this case, it might be that Carroll created the word originally and the scientist used it.  According to Carroll's Humpty Dumpty character, the word combines miserable with flimsy, although this first verse of the poem was published by Carroll in a periodical dedicated to poetry prior to the Alice stories and thus the meaning of the nonce might be a later extrapolation by the author.  He might have devised the word as Humpty Dumpty suggests, or he might have created the word merely for the sound of it, and backwritten the origin as part of the later story.

The latter fits better with the supposition that the word mimzy came to Carroll from Alice.  If he invented the word by contraction in the original history and then in the replaced history got it elsewhere, the odds are against the explanation being the same.  If, though, he simply invented it and then devised the fake etymology, it is more likely that he would have devised the same false etymology for the word given a different origin.

Underlying this, though, is a more complicated problem with the Alice Mimzy.  The fragments of Carroll we attribute to it are scattered over several years--the opening verse of Jabberwocky from an early poem, the rabbit and rabbit hole from the first Alice book, and the silvery mirror from the second book.  Yet Emma's Mimzy lasted a very few months.  The only resolution for this that works is that Carroll invented the word Mimzy for the poem, and when the scientist chose to call the rabbit by that name Carroll thought Alice got it from the poem and so included it in the story.

By this construction, the Alice Mimzy could have had a serious impact on itself, but ultimately did not.

That brings us to the modern Mimzy, with Noah and Emma.