They gave it me—for an unbirthday present.

The line comes from Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, during Alice’s encounter with the White King in the Looking-Glass world. In the episode, the King is puzzled and excited by a gift he has received, and the conversation turns on Carroll’s comic logic about birthdays versus “unbirthdays” (the many days of the year that are not one’s birthday). The remark exemplifies the book’s broader pattern of playful inversions—ordinary customs and language are treated as if they followed a different, internally consistent set of rules—typical of the nonsensical yet sharply logical humor of the Looking-Glass scenes.

The humor lies in treating a familiar social ritual—giving birthday presents—as if it could be expanded by sheer verbal ingenuity. By calling it an “unbirthday present,” the speaker reframes the exception (a non-birthday) as the norm, suggesting there are far more opportunities for celebration than convention allows. The line also showcases Carroll’s fascination with how language shapes thought: once the term exists, it seems to authorize a new category of behavior. More broadly, it satirizes pedantic reasoning and the human tendency to accept absurd conclusions when they follow from a tidy linguistic or logical premise.