Question: What do you mean by "hunting the snark"?

anon answered on 15 Jun 2010:

Good pick-up. This is a reference to a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll (He wrote Alice in wonderland). He liked to play around with words and make up his own words. He was innovative and a little mysterious. people often try and work out whether his poems were nonsense or if there was a deeper meaning.

In ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ some of the characters are: the baker, the boots, the beaver and the bellman. Do you notice that all of their initials are t.b. TB is an awful lung disease that’s still killing many people in Africa (and is increasing again here). In Lewis Carroll’s day it was a very common way to die. ‘The Snark’ is a beast that these characters are hunting. It’s supposed to be a pretty tame fellow. Unfortunately sometimes when you think you’ve found a snark it turns out to be ‘ a boojum’. A boojum is a much more evil beast. When you meet a boojum ‘you will softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again’. Some people think that the boojum was TB and that’s why there’s all the subtle references to it in the poem.

I like this poem for its siliness and mystery and I felt ‘hunting the snark’ was a silly and mysterious way to answer the question. pretty sad huh?