Nonce Upon a Time

Listener Michael Zarky dished up some thoughts on our round of nonce words from Palo Alto (SY-2028):

Of course as a child I wouldn’t have noticed that a word in The Owl and the Pussycat had no real meaning. But, looking it up now, I discover that it really has none. All the other meanings that have been tacked on to it after Lear used it several times are not consistent with the drawing he made. So it wasn’t really fair to ask for a meaning of it – anything goes, they are all a posteriori.