He would answer to “Hi!” or to any loud cry
Such as “Fry me!” or “Fritter my wig!”
To “What-you-may-call-um!” or
 “What-was-his-name!”
But especially “Thing-um-a-jig!”

These lines come from Lewis Carroll’s comic narrative poem “The Hunting of the Snark” (1876), in the fitful roll-call of the Snark-hunting crew. Carroll introduces one member, “the man they called ‘the Boots,’” whose identity is comically unstable: he is so forgettable or so accustomed to being shouted at that he responds to almost any loud, vaguely name-like cry. The passage exemplifies the poem’s mock-epic cataloguing of characters and its delight in nonsense diction, where social roles (“Boots”) and names dissolve into improvised exclamations. It also reflects Victorian comic verse traditions—sound-play, absurdity, and parody of formal introductions—while setting the tone for the expedition’s illogical, dreamlike world.

Carroll turns the problem of naming into a joke about identity and language. The “Boots” answers to “Hi!” and to increasingly absurd substitutes for a name (“What-you-may-call-um,” “What-was-his-name,” “Thing-um-a-jig”), suggesting a person reduced to a function and to others’ forgetfulness. The humor depends on the way language fails: when a proper name is missing, speakers reach for placeholders, and Carroll literalizes those placeholders as if they were real forms of address. In the broader poem, this instability of reference mirrors the Snark hunt itself—an enterprise driven by words, rules, and categories that continually slip into nonsense, leaving certainty (even about who someone is) comically out of reach.