Wordplay: Arranged and Deranged Wit

Introduction

NOTWITHSTANDING THE millions of dog and cat owners who (like me) robotically scoop poop and change litter, some misguided souls regard our species as the dominant one on the planet. I suppose this delusion is based on our ability to employ language, allowing us to communicate far more efficiently than other animals. We thus control the planet and, perhaps, will eventually destroy it. Language, however, also performs a far less serious purpose.

I’m referring to the propensity of Homo sapiens for language play. Most people cavort with their mother tongues, revelling in the sounds and their various meanings. Because language serves a recreational purpose, many people also often re-create words for their amusement. John Crosbie, who founded the International Save the Pun Foundation in 1978, succinctly expressed the process of manipulating language when he said, Puns are their own rewords. The proclivity to pun is hardly an elitist process. Walter Redfern, in his book Puns, tells us that Punning is a free-for-all available to everyone.… It is the stock-in-trade of the low comedian and the most sophisticated wordsmith. Redfern adds that puns appeal particularly to people of a certain temperament. It is my hypothesis that the inability to play with language, in one form or another, may augur some form of pathology (or, at the very least, a proclivity to believe that Adam and Eve lived in an exotic garden replete with dinosaurs).

I will admit that pronouncing definitively on what constitutes true wit is a subjective endeavour. Complicating matters even further is the fact that the employment of language wit occurs not only wittingly, but also unwittingly and sometimes even half-wittedly. When we manipulate language for the purpose of wit, I designate this process arranged wit. At times, however, humour comes from mistakes that one has made when it appears that we are dealing more with a twit or a nitwit than with a wit. This form I designate deranged wit. Ergo, I am making the case that language that is not arranged is thus deranged.

But how is this manipulation of our language achieved? The arrangement and derangement of words in English is facilitated by the multiplicity of meanings many words enjoy. For example, much wordplay treats homonyms as if they were synonyms, as in Romeo and Juliet when Romeo asks for a torch and says, Being but heavy I will bear the light. The flexibility of English aids greatly in this process. A case in point is the fact that over 20 percent of verbs started out their lives as nouns. If you take a gander at your body, you will find that virtually every part, formerly only a noun, has been adapted as a verb, so that from head to toe you can head a committee, face the music, knuckle under, foot the bill, and toe the line.

Also, starting in the twelfth century, the English language underwent a process that eliminated so many declensions and conjugations as well as precise syntax locutions that sometimes it seems that virtually any word can be interpreted in many ways, and often lewdly. For this reason, the verbs come, do, fix, have, know, make and put are all replete with sexual innuendo. These factors contribute to a greater propensity for wordplay in English than in many other languages that are more highly inflected.

Schadenfreude aside, even the kind-hearted enjoy hearing people mangle language. We even revel when they pretend to commit some language screw-up. In fact, the difference between a pun and a fabricated screw-up is not always apparent. Hence, the distinction between arranged and deranged wit is often murky. Sometimes one pretends that language has been mangled when the reality is that the process of the mistake is rather deliberate, and quite cleverly constructed. Such is the case of spoonerisms, which we will consider in Part I, Chapter 2.

Also, many a pun is without wit either because it has been used ad nauseam or is not inherently funny, but here again subjectivity raises its ugly head. We can find some patterns that show how it is that a particular group of people like a particular joke, but to a large extent the process is an individual one affected by a host of factors such as education, gender and class level. Like many other people, I have enjoyed a belly laugh from a text being so badly written that it is riotously amusing. Students in particular often commit mistakes that are rather hilarious. (See malaprops in Part II, Chapter 1.)

In Wordplay I have included many of the wittiest examples of language play from known punsters and literary greats. I have also injected much in the way of my own play on words in the form of word definitions (occasionally pictorial) as well as a bevy of new types of word puzzles to delight the reader and to make reading this book and the process of wordplay, in general, a collaborative effort.

Please note that throughout Wordplay I use the terms wit and humour interchangeably. Although these words originally had distinct senses (humour referred to one’s general condition whereas wit referred to one’s mental capacity), by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they became synonymous — unless their senses were being parsed by arcane philosophers. Nowadays, the distinction between them is so blurred that most people would regard it as pedantic to assign them to totally distinct categories. This being said, the eighth definition of wit in the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth, OED) sums up the sublimity that I associate with witmanship: That quality of speech or writing which consists in the apt association of thought and expression calculated to surprise and delight by its unexpectedness; later always with the reference to the utterance of brilliant or sparkling things in an amusing way.

I have avoided discussing humour whose intent is the degrading of a particular group because of some supposed deficiency the group possesses. Humiliation is no laughing matter, particularly when one is the nail rather than the hammer. I realize, however, that what is deemed offensive is highly personal, and if any of the wit displayed in the following pages offends someone, I am truly sorry.

And because Shakespeare informs us in Hamlet that Brevity is the soul of wit, I will keep my analysis throughout to a minimum.

Enjoy!

PART I

Arranged Wit

"The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen as

is the razor’s edge invisible."

— William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost

"When I am dead, I hope it may be said: ‘His sins were

scarlet, but his books were read.’"

— Hillaire Belloc

"True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,

What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed."

— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

CHAPTER 1

Puns

In the beginning was the pun.

— Samuel Beckett, Murphy

TO PUN OR NOT TO PUN?

If you are a reticent punster, steel your courage and silence not your tongue, for according to linguist David Crystal in Language Play almost two-thirds of the jokes in a typical language collection rely on puns. The humour in language is often deliberate, but many have posed this ludic question: To pun or not to pun? Puns have been much maligned by a host of commentators. Freud described puns as cheap, and Oliver Wendell Holmes assailed them as verbicide. Many writers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, such as John Dryden, Daniel Defoe and Joseph Addison, believed that the English language had approached perfection and that the inherent ambiguity in puns created confusion and impoliteness. In an article in the Tatler in 1710, however, Jonathan Swift mocked this affectation of politeness, because he realized, as Shakespeare did, that individual words possess multiple interpretative possibilities and humour is unavoidable. Puns have had other defenders. Three hundred years ago, Henry Erskine countered the statement that a pun is the lowest form of wit by adding that it is therefore the foundation of all wit, and Oscar Levant opined that it is the lowest form of humor — when you didn’t think of it first.

Charles Lamb connected puns to good humour, when he commented: I never knew an enemy of puns who was not an ill-natured man. A pun is a noble thing per se; it fills the mind. It is perfect as a sonnet. May my last breath be drawn through a pipe and exhaled as a pun. And James Boswell, who delighted in good company, confided, A good pun may be admitted among the small excellences of lively conversation.

Punning has, indeed, been a language fixture through the ages. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus introduces himself to the Cyclops, as Outis, which means no man in Greek. When he attacks the giant to escape from the cave, the giant calls for reinforcement from his fellow monsters with the plea No man is killing me! Naturally, no one rushes to his aid, proving that the pun is indeed mightier than the sword. Cicero was another habitual grave punster. When a man plowed up the burial ground of his father, Cicero couldn’t resist interjecting: This is truly to cultivate a father’s memory.

In the Bible there are many names that could be taken as puns. In Hebrew, adamah means ground and edom means red. The name Adam may derive from the red earth whence he came. Redman. The name Jacob is derived from the Hebrew word for heel (ah’kev), because he held onto the heel of his older twin brother Esau at birth. However, I award Jesus the prize for best Biblical pun. We read in Matthew 16:18: "Thou art Peter (Greek Petros), and upon this rock (Greek petra) I will build my Church." Upon meeting children from England in the slave market at Rome approximately a millennium and a half ago, and being told they were Anglo-Saxons, Pope Gregory I, guardian of the Rock, punned that the English slaves were Non Angli, sed angeli: not Angles, but angels.

Much later, the heyday of English language puns was the Elizabethan era. This type of wordplay was enjoyed by all strata of society, and people differentiated among all sorts of wordplay, such as pun, quibble, clinch (or clench), repartee, and double entendre. Many word-smiths adhered to a rigid separation among these terms. For example, according to the OED, a pun refers to the use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more meanings or different associations, or the use of two or more words of the same or nearly the same sound with different meanings, so as to produce a humorous effect; a play on words. A quibble, the OED informs us, is an equivocation, evasion of the point at issue; an argument depending on some likeness or difference between words or their meanings, or on some circumstance of no real importance. If the quibble was considered weak, it would be called a quarterquibble. A carriwitchet,