what's a frabjus?

The word frabjus is derived from the word frabjous, which is a word made up by Lewis Carroll that appears in a poem within his book Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The poem is called Jabberwocky. You can read more about it at wikipedia, of course, but I'll give you the complete poem here since, according to Wikipedia, it is "considered to be one of the greatest nonsense poems written in the English language."

            JABBERWOCKY

            'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

              Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

            All mimsy were the borogoves,

              And the mome raths outgrabe.

            "Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

              The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

            Beware the Jujub bird, and shun

              The frumious Bandersnatch!"

            He took his vorpal sword in hand:

              Long time the manxome foe he sought—

            So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

              And stood awhile in thought.

            And as in uffish thought he stood,

              The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

            Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,

              And burbled as it came!

            One, two! One, two! And through and through

              The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

            He left it dead, and with its head

              He went galumphing back.

            "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

              Come to my arms, my beamish boy!"

            O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

              He chortled in his joy.

            'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

              Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

            All mimsy were the borogoves,

              And the mome raths outgrabe.

At the Wikipedia page I so generously linked to above, you can find much more about this than you perhaps might have thought you wanted to, so I'll pick out the pertinent piece for you now. Near the bottom of that page it gives possible definitions for some of the nonce words used, one of them being the word 'frabjous'. Here's how it's defined: "Possibly a blend of fair, fabulous, and joyous. Definition from Oxford English Dictionary, credited to Lewis Carroll."

I'm not finished yet, so settle down, fidgety one. Now I need to tell you how I first came by this word. I didn't find it by reading Carroll's nice book; no. I had to have someone tell me about it. So now you don't have to feel badly that you haven't read it either. I remember at some point in my life long ago having this dusty old book in my hands about Alice and her looking glass, but it didn't grab me. It didn't come to my attention again until many years later when I saw that someone on Cortes Island had named their place Frabjous Day. When I enquired about it, I was told that it came from the Looking Glass book of Carroll's. I thought that was a great name for a place on the water, as I first heard it as "Frabjous Bay." I only got it right after repeated tellings, and then it wasn't until I moved off Cortes and the internet came along and I was able to just plunk the word into a search field, that I came up with the back story. And the correct spelling.

The reason I was looking for the back story was because I had used "frabjusday" as an internet user ID and I wanted to know if it had a meaning and what that meaning might be. So there you have it. It's still one of my handles, and now it's incorporated into the name of this blog. Actually, the blog would have been called simply "frabjusday," only apparently someone else has that name. Imagine! And you know what burns me (just joking, of course: I don't burn) is that Lisa, who clamped onto that blog handle, not only hasn't made an entry since her first one back on March 15, 2006—a one-liner repetition of the line from the poem that has "frabjous day" in it—but she bloody-well didn't spell it right! Aaargh! (hahaha!)