[Copied faithfully but without permission from "The Thurber Carnival", 
(c) through 1945 by James Thurber, published y Harper & Bros., pp. 43-46]
[rusin@math.niu.edu  2000/06/13]

"What Do You Mean It <i>Was</i> Brillig?" [by James Thurber]

I was sitting at my typewriter one afternoon several weeks ago,
staring at a piece of blank white paper, when Della walked in.
"They are here with the reeves," she said. It did not surprise me
that they were.  With a colored woman like Della in the house it
would not surprise me if they showed up with the toves. In
Della's afternoon it is always brillig; she could outgrabe a mome
rath on any wabe in the world. Only Lewis Carroll would have
understood Della completely. I try hard enough. "Let them wait a
minute," I said.  I got out the big Century Dictionary and put it
on my lap and looked up "reeve." It is an interesting word, like
all of Della's words; I found out that there are four kinds of
reeves.  "Are they here with strings of onions?" I asked. Della
said they were not.  "Are they here with enclosures or pens for
cattle, poultry, or pigs; sheepfolds?" Della said no sir.  "Are
they here with administrative officers?" From a little nearer the
door Della said no again.  "Then they've got to be here," I said,
"with some females of the common European sandpiper."  These
scenes of ours take as much out of Della as they do out of me,
but she is not a woman to be put down by a crazy man with a
dictionary. "They are here with the reeves for the windas," said
Della with brave stubbornness. Then, of course, I understood what
they were there with: they were there with the Christmas wreaths
for the windows. "Oh <i>those</i> reeves!" I said. We were both
greatly relieved; we both laughed. Della and I never quite reach
the breaking point; we just come close to it.

Della is a New England colored woman with nothing of the South in
her accent; she doesn't say "d" for "th" and she pronounces her
"r"s.  Hearing her talk in the next room, you might not know at
first that she was colored. You might not know till she said some
such thing as "Do you want cretonnes for the soup tonight?" (She
makes wonderful cretonnes for the soup.)  I have not found out
much about Della's words, but I have learned a great deal about
her background. She told me one day that she has three brothers
and that one of them works into a garage and another works into
an incinerator where they burn the refuge.  The one that works
into the incinerator has been working into it since the
Armitage. That's what Della does to you; she gives you
incinerator perfectly and then comes out with the Armitage. I
spent most of an hour one afternoon trying to figure out what was
wrong with the Armitage; I thought of Armistead and armature and
Armentieres [Armenti&egrave;res], and when I finally hit on
Armistice it sounded crazy. It still does. Della's third and
youngest brother is my favorite; I think he'll be yours, too, and
everybody else's.  His name is Arthur and it seems that he has
just passed, with commendably high grades, his silver-service
eliminations. Della is delighted about that, but she is not half
so delighted about it as I am.

Della came to our house in Connecticut some months ago, trailing
her glory of cloudiness. I can place the date for you
approximately: it was while there were still a great many
fletchers about. "The lawn is full of fletchers," Della told me
one morning, shortly after she arrived, when she brought up my
orange juice. "You mean neighbors?" I said.  "This early?" By the
way she laughed I knew that fletchers weren't people; at least
not people of flesh and blood. I got dressed and went downstairs
and looked up the word in the indispensable Century. A fletcher,
I found, is a man who makes arrows. I decided, but without a
great deal of conviction, that there couldn't be any arrow-makers
on my lawn at that hour in the morning and at this particular
period in history.  I walked cautiously out the back door and
around to the front of the house -- and there they were. I don't
know many birds but I do know flickers.  A flicker is a bird
which, if it were really named fletcher, would be called a
flicker by all the colored cooks in the United States. Out of a
mild curiosity I looked up "flicker" in the dictionary and I
discovered that he is a bird of several aliases. When Della
brought my toast and coffee into the dining room I told her about
this. "Fletchers," I said, "are also golden-winged woodpeckers,
yellowhammers, and high-holders." For the first time Della gave
me the look that I was to recognize later, during the scene about
the reeves.  I have become very familiar with that look and I
believe I know the thoughts that lie behind it.  Della was
puzzled at first because I work at home instead of in an office,
but I think she has it figured out now. This man, she thinks,
used to work into an office like anybody else, but he had to be
sent to an institution; he got well enough to come home from the
institution, but he is still not well enough to go back to the
office.  I could have avoided all these suspicions, of course, if
I had simply come out in the beginning and corrected Della when
she got words wrong. Coming at here obliquely with a dictionary
only enriches the confusion; but I wouldn't have it any other
way.  I share with Della a form of escapism that is the most
mystic and satisfying flight from actuality I have ever known.
It may not always comfort me, but it never ceases to beguile me.

Every Thursday when I drive Della to Waterbury in the car for her
day off, I explore the dark depths and the strange recesses of
her nomenclature.  I found out that she had been married for ten
years but was now divorced; that is, her husband went away one
day and never came back. When I asked her what he did for a
living, she said he worked into a dove-wedding. "Into a what?" I
asked. "Into a dove-wedding," said Della. It is one of the words
I haven't figured out yet, but I am still working on it. "Where
are you from, Mr. Thurl?" she asked me one day. I told her Ohio,
and she said, "Ooooh, to be sure!" as if I had given her a clue
to my crazy definitions, my insensitivity to the ordinary
household nouns, and my ignorance of the commoner migratory
birds. "Semantics, Ohio," I said. "Why, there's one of them in
Massachusetts, too," said Della. "The one I mean," I told her,
"is bigger and more confusing." "I'll bet it is," said Della.

Della told me the other day that she had had only one sister, a
beautiful girl who died when she was twenty-one. "That's too
bad," I said. "What was the matter?" Della had what was the
matter at her tongue's tip. "She got tuberculosis from her
teeth," she said, "and it went all through her symptom." I didn't
know what to say to that except that my teeth were all right but
that my symptom could probably be easily gone all through. "You
work too much with your brain," said Della. I know she was trying
to draw me out about my brain and what had happened to it so that
I could no longer work into an office, but I changed the
subject. There is no doubt that Della is considerably worried
about my mental condition. One morning when I didn't get up till
noon because I had been writing letters until three o'clock,
Della told my wife at breakfast what was the matter with me. "His
mind works so fast his body can't keep up with it," she
said. This diagnosis has shaken me not a little. I have decided
to sleep longer and work less. I know exactly what will happen to
me if my mind gets so far ahead of my body that my body can't
catch up with it.  They will come with a reeve and this time it
won't be a red-and-green one for the window, it will be a black
one for the door.