“Making nonsense is very difficult.”
Indeed.
Douglas R. Hofstadter wrote an essay “Stuff and Nonsense” (December 1982), included in his book “Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern”.
He concludes: “…The purpose of this column was to emphasize the very fine line that separates the meaningful from the meaningless. It is a boundary line that has a great deal to do with the nature of human intelligence, because the question of how meaning emerges out of meaningless constituents when combined in certain patterned ways is still a perplexing one….”.
English language has produced plenty of delightful nonsense, in the form of verses, poems etc. One example:
“Buz, quoth the blue fly,
Hum, quoth the bee,
Buz and hum they cry,
And so do we:
In his ear, in his nose, thus, do you see?
He ate the dormouse; else it was he.”
By Ben Jonson
Indian languages too have produced plenty of nonsense.
In January 2007, Penguin published- “The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense Edited By Michael Heyman with Sumanyu Satpathy and Anushka Ravishankar”
In Marathi, Vinda Karandikar विंदा करंदीकर has written quite a bit of 'nonsense'.
Hindi films have plenty of nonsense. Playback singer and actor Kishore Kumar किशोर कुमार was the greatest practitioner of it.
Now, you and I may never understand, in following picture, what the lady means by "grrzlackity….bonk" but the motor mechanic surely does!
Artist: Sidney Hoff The New Yorker 4 Nov 1950