Authors: Bill Bryson
Whether or not it makes much sense—and I would almost bet my house that it doesn't—we can but admire the dedication that must have gone into it.
Possibly the most demanding form of wordplay in English—or indeed in any language—is the palindrome. The word was first used in English by Ben Jonson in 1629. A good palindrome is an exceedingly rare thing. Most of them require a generosity of spirit to say that they make much sense,
as in "Mad
Zeus, no live devil,
WORDPL AY
lived evil on Suez dam" or "Stiff, 0 dairyman, in a myriad of fits"
or "Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts," all three of which deserve an A+ for length and a D— for sensibility. Or else they involve manipulations of spelling, as the short but notable
"Yreka Bakery" or the rather more venerable "Lewd I did live, & evil did I dwel." This last, according to Willard R. Espy in
The
Game of Words, was
written by the English poet John Taylor and is the first recorded palindrome in English, though in fact it isn't really a palindrome since it only works if you use an ampersand instead of
and.
The reason there are so many bad palindromes, of course, is that they are so very difficult to construct. So good ones are all the more cherishable for their rarity. Probably the most famous palindrome is one of the best. It mansesiuCust seven words to tell an entirely sensible story: "A man,aptma canal, Panama!" That is simply inspired. Others that have the virtue of making at least some kind of sense:
Norma is as selfless
as
I am, Ron.
Was it Eliot's toilet I saw?
Too far, Edna, we wander afoot.
Madam, I'm Adam.
Sex at noon taxes.
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?
Able was I ere I saw Elba.
Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus.
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
This last, I realize, does not even begin to pass the plausibility test, but so what? Anyone ingenious enough to work
oscillate,
metallic,
and
sonatas
into one palindrome is exempt from all re-quirements bearing on sense. The Greeks and Romans also had a kind of palindrome in which it is the words rather than the letters that are read in reverse order—rather as if the English sentence
"Jack loves Jill, not Jane" had its word order reversed to read
"Jane, not Jill, loves Jack," giving an entirely new sense. This kind of palindrome has never caught on in the English-speaking world,
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largely because English doesn't lend itself to it very well. I've been working on it most of the afternoon (I told you wordplay is addic-tive) and the best I can come up with is "Am I as stupid as you are?" which reads backwards as well as forwards but, alas, keeps the same sense in both directions.
Not far removed from the palindrome is the anagram, in which the letters of a word or name are jumbled to make a new, and ideally telling, phrase. Thus "Ronald Wilson Reagan" becomes
"Insane Anglo Warlord"; "Spiro Agnew" becomes -Grow a Penis."
Again, one can but gasp at the ingenuity and dedication that have gone into some of them. What kind of mind is it that can notice that
"two plus eleven" and "one plus twelve" not only give the same result but use the same letters? Other famous or notable anagrams: Western Union = no wire unsent
circumstantial evidence = can ruin a selected victim a stitch in time saves nine = this is meant as incentive William Shakespeare = I am a weakish speller (or) I like Mr.
W. H. as a pal, see? (or) We all make his praise
funeral = real fun
The Morse Code = Here come dots
Victoria, England's Queen = governs a nice quiet land parishioners = I hire parsons
intoxicate = excitation
schoolmaster = the classroom
mother-in-law = woman Hitler
Another form of wordplay is the
rebus,
a kind of verbal riddle in which words and symbols are arranged in a way that gives a clue to the intended meaning. Can you, for example, guess the meaning of this address?
Wood
John
Mass
It is "John Underwood, Andover, Massachusetts." Many books and articles on word games say that such an address was once put
WORDPLAY
on an envelope and that the letter actually got there, which sug-gests either that the postal service was once a lot better or writers more gullible than they are now. These days the rebus is a largely forgotten form, except on American license plates, where owners sometimes feel compelled to tell you their name or what they do for a living (like the doctor who put SAY AH), pose a metaphysical question (Y ME) or a provocative one (RUNVS), or just offer a friendly farewell (ALLBCNU). My favorite was the license plate on a truck from a McDonald's Farm that just said EIEIO. If nothing else, these vanity plates tell us something about the spirit of the age. According to a 1984 report in the
Los Angeles Times,*
the most frequently requested plate in 1970 was PEACE. By 198 4 that had been replaced by GO FOR IT.
The French, in accordance with their high regard for the cere-bral, have long cultivated a love of wordplay. In the Middle Ages, they even had a post of Anagrammatist to the King. One of the great French wordplayers was the novelist Georges Perec, who before his early death in 1982 was a guiding force in the group called OuLiPo (for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle) whose mem-bers delighted in setting themselves complex verbal challenges.
Perec once wrote a novel without once using the letter
e
(such compositions are called
lipograms)
and also composed a 5,000-letter palindrome on the subject of, you guessed it, palindromes.
An example of a French rebus is "Ga = I am very hungry." To understand it you must know that in French capital G ("G grand") and small a ("a petit") are pronounced the same as "J'ai grand appetit." N'est-ce-pas? But the French go in for many other games, including some we don't have. One of the more clever French word games is the
holorime, a
two-line poem in which each line is pronounced the same but uses different words. As you will quickly see from the following example, sense often takes a backseat to euphony in these contrivances:
"Par le bois du Djinn, ou s'entasse de l'effroi,
"Parle! Bois du gin, ou cent tasses de lait froid!"
* Quoted in Verbatim, Vol. XIV, No .
4.
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It translates roughly as "When going through the Djinn's woods, surrounded by so much fear, keep talking. Drink gin or a hundred cups of cold milk." We have the capacity to do this m English—"I love you" and "isle of view" are holorimic phrases and there must be an infinity of others. William Safire cites the American grand-mother who thought that the line in the Beatles' song about "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes" was "the girl with colitis goes by,"
which would seem to offer rich potential to budding holorimistes.
A rare attempt to compose an English holorime was made by the British humorist Miles Kington (from whom the previous example is quoted) in 1988 when he offered the world this poem, called A
Lowlands Holiday Ends in Enjoyable Inactivity:
"In Ayrshire hill areas, a cruise, eh, lass?
"Inertia, hilarious, accrues, helas."
From this I think we can conclude that the definitive English holorime has yet to be written. However, an old children's riddle does seem to come close. It is the one that poses the question
"How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?" The answer: (1) a sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane; (2) an inclined plane is a slope up; (3) a slow pup is a lazy dog.
We may not have holorimes in English, but we do have tricks that the French don't have.
Clerihews,
for instance. Named after their deviser, one E. Clerihew Bentley, an English journalist, they are pithy poems that always start with someone's name and pur-port, in just four lines, to convey the salient facts of the subject's life. To wit:
Sir Humphry Davy
Detested gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having invented sodium.
The closest America has come to producing an equivalent to clerihews were the Burma-Shave signs that graced U.S. highways for half a century. Devised in 1926 by Allan Odell, son of the
WORDPLAY
founder of the Burma-Shave company, these consisted of five or six signs spaced one hundred feet apart which give a witty sales jingle for Burma-Shave shaving cream. Some examples: "A peach / l00ks good / with lots of fuzz / but man's no peach / and never was. /
BURMA-SHAVE." Or "Don't take a curve / at 6o per. / We hate to lose / a customer. / BURMA-SHAVE." Some of the best ones never made it to the roadside because they were considered t00
risque for the time. For instance: "If wifie shuns / your fond embrace / don't shoot / the iceman / feel your face." As recently as the 196os, there were still 7,000 sets of Burma-Shave signs along American roadsides. But the Highway Beautification Act of 1965
put an end to the erection of any new ones, and the old ones were quickly whisked away by souvenir hunters. Now they are so much a thing of the past that a publicity woman at American Safety Razor, the company that now owns the Burma-Shave name, had never even heard of them.
We have a deep-rooted delight in the comic effect of words in English, and not just in advertising jingles but at the highest level of endeavor. As Jespersen notes: "No literature in the world abounds as English does in characters made ridiculous to the reader by the manner in which they misapply or distort 'big' words,"* and he cites, among others, Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop, Fielding's Mrs.
Slipslop, Dickens's Sam Weller, and Shakespeare's Mrs. Quickly.
All of these were created for comic effect in plays and novels, but sometimes it comes naturally, as with that most famous of word muddlers, the Reveren William Spooner, warden of New College at Oxford University from 1903 to 1924, whose habittualtransposi-tion of sounds—metaphasis is the technical term—mad him fa-mous in his own lifetime and gave the world a word,
spoonerism.
A little-known fact about Sp00ner was that he was an albino . He was also famously boring, a shortcoming that he himself acknowl-edged when he wrote plaintively of his sermons in his diary: "They are so apt to be dull." In a profile in the London
Echo
in 1905, the reporter noted that Spooner "has been singularly unsuccessful in making any decided impression upon his own college." But his
• The Growth and Structure of the English Language,
page 150.
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most outstanding characteristic was his facility for turning plarases on their heads. Among the more famous utterances invariably at-tributed to him are "Which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?" and, to a delinquent undergraduate: "You have hissed my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. You will leave Oxford on the next town drain." At an optician's he is said to have asked, "Have you a signifying glass?" and when told they did not, replied, "Oh, well, it doesn't magnify." But as his biog-rapher William Hayter notes, Spooner became so well-known for these transpositions that it is sometimes impossible to know which he really said and which were devised in his name. He
is
known to have said(in a dark glassly,nd-to have announced at a wedding ceremony that a couple were now "loifully jawned," but it is alto-gether possible that he actually said very few of the spoonerisms attributed to him and that the genuine utterances weren't nearly as comical as those he
was
credited with, like the almost certainly apocryphal "Please sew me to another sheet. Someone is occupew-ing my pie."
What is certain is that Spooner suffered from a kind of metapha-sis of thought, if not always of word. These are generally well attributed. Outside the New College chapel he rebuked a student by saying: "I thought you read the lesson badly today."
"But, Sir, I didn't read the lesson," protested the student.
"Ah," said Spooner, "I thought you didn't," and walked on.
On another occasion he approached a fellow don and said, "Do come to dinner tonight to meet our new Fellow, Casson."
The man answered, "But, Warden, I
am
Casson."
To which Spooner replied, "Never mind, come all the same."
Another colleague once received a note from Spooner asking him to come to his office the next morning on a matter of urgency. At the bottom there was
a
P. S. saying that the matter had now been resolved and the colleague needn't bother coming after all.
Spooner well knew his reputation for bungling speech and hated it. Once when a group of drunken students called at his window for him to make a speech, he answered testily, "You don't want to hear me make a speech. You just hope I'll say one of those . . .
things."
In addition to mangling words in amusing ways, something else
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we can do in English that they cannot always do in other languages is construct intentionally ambiguous sentences that can be taken in either of two ways, as in the famous, if no doubt apocryphal, notice in a restaurant saying: "Customers who think our waiters are rude should see the manager. - There_is_a technical term for this (isn't there always?). It's calle
amphibology.
An admirable example of this neglected art was Benjamin Israeli's airy note to an aspiring author: "Thank you so much for the book. I. shall lose no time in reading it." Samuel Johnson didn't quite utter an amphibology, but he neared it in spirit, when he wrote to another would-be author,
"Your work is both good and original. Unfortunately, the parts that
,
are good aren't original, and the parts that are original aren't good."
Occasionally people grow so carried away with the possibilities of wordplay that they weave it into their everyday language. The most famous example of this in America is b
oontling - a
made-up language once spoken widely in and around Boonville,C alifornia.