“Twas brillig” A look at The Moral Thinking of Emerging Adults

1

The Jabberwocky by John Tenniel

“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”

So begins Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem, “Jabberwocky”, in “Through The Looking Glass”. After Alice had read the entire poem the narrative continues,

It seems very pretty,’ she said when she had finished it, ‘but it’s rather hard to understand!’ (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) ‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas–only I don’t exactly know what they are!

One has a similar feeling when trying to discern the moral thinking of a group of young adults in sociologist, Christian Smith’s book, “Lost in Transition, The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood”.