Das Nasobēm, usually translated into English as The Nasobame, is a short nonsense poem by German writer Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914). It was written around 1895 and published in his book Galgenlieder (1905). [1]
Nonsense is a communication, via speech, writing, or any other symbolic system, that lacks any coherent meaning. Sometimes in ordinary usage, nonsense is synonymous with absurdity or the ridiculous. Many poets, novelists and songwriters have used nonsense in their works, often creating entire works using it for reasons ranging from pure comic amusement or satire, to illustrating a point about language or reasoning. In the philosophy of language and philosophy of science, nonsense is distinguished from sense or meaningfulness, and attempts have been made to come up with a coherent and consistent method of distinguishing sense from nonsense. It is also an important field of study in cryptography regarding separating a signal from noise.
Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe, who share a common German ancestry, culture and history. German is the shared mother tongue of a substantial majority of ethnic Germans.
Christian Otto Josef Wolfgang Morgenstern was a German author and poet from Munich. Morgenstern married Margareta Gosebruch von Liechtenstern on 7 March 1910. He worked for a while as a journalist in Berlin, but spent much of his life traveling through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, primarily in a vain attempt to recover his health. His travels, though they failed to restore him to health, allowed him to meet many of the foremost literary and philosophical figures of his time in central Europe.
Auf seinen Nasen schreitet | Striding on its noses |
This poem is notable for, among other things, having inspired zoologist Gerolf Steiner to write in 1961 an extremely popular mock-scientific treatise on the fictitious animal order of the Rhinogradentia, also called "nasobames" or "snouters", whose nasal appendages had evolved in many amazing ways. [2] Poetic translations of this poem (by Robert Weill - French, G.G. Simpson - English and L. Chadwick - English) can be found in his 1988 sequel . [3]
Gerolf Steiner was a German zoologist.
In biological classification, the order is
- a taxonomic rank used in the classification of organisms and recognized by the nomenclature codes. Other well-known ranks are life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, family, genus, and species, with order fitting in between class and family. An immediately higher rank, superorder, may be added directly above order, while suborder would be a lower rank.
- a taxonomic unit, a taxon, in that rank. In that case the plural is orders.
Rhinogradentia is a fictitious order of mammal invented by German zoologist Gerolf Steiner. Members of the order, known as rhinogrades or snouters, are characterized by a nose-like feature called a nasorium, which evolved to fulfill a wide variety of functions in different species. Steiner also created a fictional persona, naturalist Harald Stümpke, who is credited as author of the 1957 book Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia. According to Steiner, it is the only remaining record of the animals, which were wiped out, along with all the world's Rhinogradentia researchers, when the small Pacific archipelago they inhabited sank into the ocean due to nearby atomic bomb testing.
