Words Gone Wild: Puns, Puzzles, Poesy, Palaver, Persiflage, and Poppycock
256
Words Gone Wild: Puns, Puzzles, Poesy, Palaver, Persiflage, and Poppycock
256eBookProprietary (Proprietary)
Related collections and offers
Overview
Puns from Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, the Bible, George S. Kaufman, and Groucho Marx vie for attention with comical spoonerisms, droll malapropisms, witty anagrams, and humorous palindromes—plus original material by the author—including limericks, clerihews, crossword puzzles, acrostic puzzles, tonguetwisters, and other kinds of word play. Some examples:
- Why does a match box? Because it sees a tin can.
- Time ?ies like an arrow. Fruit ?ies like a banana.
- The pony was unable to talk because he was a little hoarse.
- Two peanuts went into a bar. One was a salted.
- The chicken that crossed the road was pure poultry in motion.
- As the gardener said when asked why he was cutting grass with a pair of scissors: “That’s all there is; there isn’t any mower.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626369368 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Jim Bernhard is the author of Puns, Puzzles, and Word Play: Fun and Games for Language Lovers; Porcupine, Picayune, & Post: How Newspapers Get Their Names; and, with his wife, Virginia, Life Is NOT a Dress Rehearsal: 10 Lists to Make Before Your Final Exit. He has an MA in English literature from the University of Birmingham in England, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Rice University. Bernhard is also a playwright, lyricist, actor, theatrical manager, and crossword puzzle constructor. He resides in Houston, Texas.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ONCE A PUN A TIME
Puns: Homographs, Homophones, Assonants, and Feghoots
"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone. "When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra."
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Puns are the potato chips of literature. There's not much substance to them, but they are a ubiquitous garnish, adding zest to more solid fare. What does it matter if sometimes they are a little salty or maybe even downright cheesy? Serious writers from homer to Thomas Pynchon have dished up puns to add spice to their weighty texts. Readers eat them up, even if they feel a smidgen of guilt in doing so. Face it, whenever we encounter puns (or potato chips), we can't resist the temptation to savor them — even though we scold ourselves for having succumbed to their subversive delectability. Unlike potato chips, puns never go stale. Even if you have already come across some of the puns in this chapter, you can relish them again — and, as you will find, not all puns are potato chips: some are pure corn.
The word pun is believed, at least by some etymologists, to be a contraction of the English word pundigrion or, possibly, punnet — both of which are thankfully now archaic, but in their prime were used to mean a "quibble," a "cavil," or a "small or fine point of argument." Both words derive from the Italian puntiglio, which in turn came from the Latin punctum, meaning "a small detail." Pun was first used as a word in the English Restoration period, sometime in the 1660s. This fascinating etymological history comes from the Oxford English Dictionary, which reluctantly admits at the conclusion of its scholarly note that it is all purely conjectural and may not have happened that way at all.
Defining a pun is more clear-cut. According to the Oxford Companion to the English Language, a pun is "the conflation of homonyms and near homonyms to produce a humorous effect." No equivocal waffling there!
These Oxford references might lead you to believe that graduates of that esteemed university have a special fondness for this form of humor — all that pun-ting on the Isis, perhaps. But it was an Oxford man, Samuel Johnson, who insisted, "The pun is the lowest form of humor." Johnson, to be sure, was not a true Oxonian, since he had to leave the university after his first year owing to a shortage of funds. Like others who have initially sneered at the pun, however, Dr. Johnson (Oxford finally grudgingly awarded him a degree when he was forty-six) was not above dabbling on occasion in the slums of rhetoric. One of his alleged witticisms concerned two women yelling at each other across an alleyway from their respective houses.
"They'll never agree," Johnson reputedly said, "for they are arguing from different premises." He seems to have regretted such lapses, although not with true repentance, for he also wrote: "If I were punished for every pun I shed, there would not be left a puny shed of my punnish head."
A latter-day pundit (well, yes, a pun is intended), Oscar Levant, with no known Oxford connections, improved upon Johnson's puntification when he said, "The pun is the lowest form of humor — if you don't think of it first." (It was also Levant — pianist, actor, talk show denizen — who reminded us: "There is a fine line between genius and insanity; I have erased that line.")
Most puns — maybe all of them if you want to get seriously analytical about it — are one of three types, or a combination of them. A homographic pun uses two or more words that are spelled exactly alike but have different meanings: Why does a match box? Because it sees a tin can.
A homophonic pun exploits words that sound alike, but have different spellings and meanings: The pony was unable to talk because he was a little hoarse.
An assonant pun alludes to one or more words that have a similarity in sound but which are not identical in sound, spelling, or meaning: A woman received a bouquet made up only of ferns and other greenery with no flowers. She said, "With fronds like these, who needs anemones?"
The poor, put-upon pun seems always to attract crotchety words. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., poet and physician, wrote in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table: "People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism ... . A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide." Mind you, this is the very same Holmes who as a physician assured his patients that he was "grateful for small fevers."
Speaking of Holmes, in this case Sherlock, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung, once remarked of the famously arrogant fictional detective: "Though he might be more humble, there's no police like Holmes."
In a kind of backhanded compliment, Edgar Allan Poe, in one of his less eerie moments, proclaimed, "The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability." He perhaps demonstrated his own capacity to plumb the depths of punniness with his invention of the Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss in "The Devil in the Belfry." Of course Poe cannot be held personally responsible for the Baltimore dining establishment called "The Tell-Tale Hearth," which offers "pizza worth raven about" or for the city's "Poe-boy sandwiches."
Despite the verbal punishment it has uncomplainingly endured — who among us has not groaned at an egregious one? — the pun boasts a noble literary heritage. You can find puns (if you look hard enough) in the writings of ancient Greeks, including Homer, Sophocles, and, of course, that old funster, Aristophanes. Discerning a pun in translation is always tricky, especially for those of us with small Latin and less Greek, but learned scholars give us such passages from Homer's Odyssey as this one in which Odysseus tells his captor, Polyphemus the Cyclops, that his name is "Nobody." Having got Polyphemus drunk on wine, Odysseus blinds him in his one good eye, and when Polyphemus cries for help from his fellow Cyclopses, they call to him, "What's the matter?" Polyphemus replies: "Nobody is trying to kill me. Nobody's treachery is doing me to death." "Well, then," the other Cyclopses all say, "if nobody's harming you, there's nothing we need to do about it." Odysseus and his men then have a good chortle before escaping the blinded Polyphemus by concealing themselves under his sheep as they amble into the pastures.
Greek drama, too, had its share of puns, as in this exchange in Aristophanes' The Clouds, a satire on Socratic philosophy, in which Strepsiades inquires about some of the students in Socrates's academy: "Why do those over there stoop down so much?" "Oh, they're diving deep into the deepest secrets." "And why are their rumps turned up to the sky?" "They're taking ... private lessons on the stars."
The plays on the words "diving deep" in connection with stooping and with learning secrets, and of "private" in connection with rump and with lessons, are unmistakable examples of Aristophanes's irreverent and often bawdy jests.
On a more serious note — yes, puns can be serious — one of the central symbols of Sophocles's tragedy Oedipus Rex is drawn from a pun in Greek mythology, the famed Riddle of the Sphinx. The Sphinx, a monster with a lion's body and a human head, asked travelers to solve this riddle: "What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs at night — and the more legs it has the weaker it is?" Oedipus was the only one who knew the answer: "A man crawls on all fours as a baby, walks upright as an adult, and uses a staff to support him when he's old." Although it is not spelled out in the text of the play, the riddle is alluded to and represents the fate not only of Oedipus himself but also of all mankind.
An important Christian tenet is expressed in the Bible with a pun uttered by no less than Jesus Christ. In chapter 16, verse 18, of the Book of Matthew, Jesus tells one of his disciples: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church." This is a pun that works in many languages, although, alas, not in English. When Jesus recruited Simon as an apostle, he renamed him Cephas, which is the Aramaic word for "rock." It makes its way into St. Matthew's Greek as the name Petros, which is close enough to petra, the Greek for "rock," that the pun still works. Thence into Latin, where Greek has been appropriated for Petrus the name and petra the rock.
When the passage reaches a French translation, the pun becomes exact once more, as it originally was in Aramaic: "Tu es Pierre, et sur cette pierre je bâtirai mon Église." Even in Spanish and Italian the names for Peter (Pedro and Pietro) and the words for rock (piedra and pietra) are still close enough to make the pun's point. But when you get to English, a more literal translation might be "Thou art Rock, and upon this rock I will build my church," but the name Rock probably would not have occurred to seventeenth-century English translators as readily as it did to the Hollywood publicist who re-christened Roy Harold Fitzgerald as Rock Hudson. In any event, it would be difficult to use the name in a liturgical setting today, at least with a straight face.
By the time Chaucer comes along with his Middle English in the fourteenth century, puns — even though the word itself is not yet known — are more frequent, more comical, and more easily identified by modern readers. In The Canterbury Tales, the Pardoner observes:
"I rekke nevere, whan that they been beryed, Though that hir soules goon a-blakeberyed!"
By this he means, as if you didn't know, that he doesn't care what happens to his parishioners' souls after they are buried — they can go gather blackberries for all he cares. And Chaucer didn't even own a BlackBerry! Even without a smartphone, you should have no trouble with the Summoner's invective against a wicked friar, as he prays for his fellow pilgrims: "God save yow alle, save this cursed Frere!" The two meanings of save should warrant at least a small chuckle from all but the most monkish.
The frequency of Shakespeare's punning puts poor old Chaucer to shame. The Bard of Avon punned frequently, blatantly, bawdily, comically, and with impunity.
"Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York" are the opening lines of Richard III, in which Richard refers to the defeat of the Lancastrians by his brother, King Edward, who was the son of the former Duke of York. As Shakespeare's audience would know, the "sun of York" also referred to the appearance in the sky, during the crucial battle, of an optical illusion in which it appeared that there were three suns, a symbol of victory, representing the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. It would be delightful to stretch the pun even further by suggesting that Richard was commenting on the fair weather he was enjoying in York — but, unfortunately, according to Shakespeare he spoke the lines in London, where, of course, the sun never shines.
A few more examples will establish Shakespeare's unshakeable reputation as a long-distance punner. In Henry IV Part 1, Falstaff observes to Hal that it is "here apparent that thou art heir apparent." In Henry VI Part 2 York expresses his impatience with the duke of Suffolk thus: "For Suffolk's duke, may he be suffocate." In Romeo and Juliet, when Mercutio is mortally wounded by Tybalt, he says: "Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man." In Henry V, Pistol vows: "To England will I steal, and there I'll steal."
Enough, Will, enough! Shakespeare was also the master of the naughty pun sometimes known as a double entendre. But you will have to earn your titillation with these additional ribaldries by slogging through several more chapters.
Pistol's line about stealing to and stealing in England is a type of homographic pun known as an antanaclasis (pronounced, says Webster, with the accent on the "nac"). It means using the same word twice, but in two different senses. Some of the better antana-clases that you've probably already heard are:
* "If we do not all hang together, we shall all hang separately." (Benjamin Franklin)
* "If you're not fired with enthusiasm, you'll be fired with enthusiasm." (Vince Lombardi)
* "Put out the light, and then put out the light." (Shakespeare — him again! — Othello)
* "I'm seeing spots before my eyes." "Have you seen a doctor?" "No, just spots."
There are also implied antanaclases, in which the punned word does not appear twice, but its two meanings are obviously implied from the context:
* Have your eyes ever been checked? No, they've always been brown.
* Do you file your nails? No, I just throw them away after I've cut them.
A double antanaclasis is also possible, as in "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana," attributed to Groucho Marx. Both the words "flies" and "like" are used in different senses.
In their films, Groucho and his Marxist brothers never let a word go un-pun-ished if they could help it. Some of their efforts were sublimely elegant — perhaps with the help of George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, who are credited with many of the screenplays, including this exchange from A Night at the Opera:
Driftwood (Groucho, examining a contract): "Oh, that? Oh, that's the usual clause. That's in every contract. That just says ... it says ... 'If any of the parties participating in this contract is shown not to be in their right mind, the entire agreement is automatically nullified.'"
Fiorello (Chico): "Well, I don't know ... "
Driftwood: "It's all right, that's, that's in every contract. That's, that's what they call a 'sanity clause.'"
Fiorello: "Ha ha ha ha ha! You can't fool me! There ain't no Sanity Clause!"
Here, a combination of assonant words (Santa and sanity) and homophonic words (Claus and clause) is the culmination of a neatly structured setup that provides a flawless payoff.
Among modern works, James Joyce's Ulysses and the impenetrable Finnegans Wake win the Pullet Surprise for most puns per line of type — more often than not either obscene or so obscure as to be incomprehensible. Among the better ones that fall into neither category is the line in Ulysses when Leopold Bloom contemplates his lunch, eyes the items on a shelf in a pub, and then invokes Genesis: "Sandwich? Ham and his descendants mustered and bred there."
The inveterate punster's idea of bliss is to construct an elaborate tale that results in multiple puns. Sometimes they're called shaggy-dog stories. The nineteenth-century U.S. Senator from Illinois Charles B. Farwell, described by the New York Times as an "earnest, active Republican" and also as "one of the heartiest of men and most cheery of the well-known prominent citizens of Chicago," had extensive cattle holdings in Texas. He claimed that the only perfect triple pun in the English language concerned the three brothers who inherited three parcels of land from their father and wanted to combine them into one cattle ranch. They didn't know what to name their ranch until their widowed mother suggested: "Focus — for it's where the sons raise meat." A Rice University physics student went Farwell one better than by turning it into a quadruple pun: where the mourning sons raise meat.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Words Gone Wild"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Jim Bernhard.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
PREFACE,
CHAPTER ONE ONCE A PUN A TIME Puns: Homographs, Homophones, Assonants, and Feghoots,
CHAPTER TWO RISQUÉ BUSINESS Clerihews and Limericks,
CHAPTER THREE LETTER RIP! Lipograms, Univocalics, Anagrams, Palindromes, Charade Sentences, Rhopalics, Isoliterals, and Isosyllabics,
CHAPTER FOUR THINKING INSIDE THE BOX Crossword Puzzles,
CHAPTER FIVE IF YOU SAY SO Wellerisms, Tom Swifties, Croakers, and Envelope-Pushers,
CHAPTER SIX BEWARE THE DOGGEREL! Rhymes Without Reason,
CHAPTER SEVEN HAVE YOU TASTED YOUR WORM? Spoonerisms, Malapropisms, Mondegreens, Eggcorns, and Holorimes,
CHAPTER EIGHT GOD SAVE THE QUEENS! Acrostic Puzzles,
CHAPTER NINE TICKLING YOUR RIBALDRY Double Entendres, Newspaper Headlines, Knock-Knock Jokes,
CHAPTER TEN NONSENSE FOR THE NONCE Verse for Special Occasions,
CHAPTER ELEVEN INTO THE CRYPT I CREEP Cryptic Puzzles,
CHAPTER TWELVE RAGBAG Euphemisms, Highly Irregular Conjugations, Tongue-Twisters, Theater-by-the Numbers, Rhyming Slang, and Name Games,
L'ENVOI,
ANSWERS TO PUZZLES,
INDEX,