Wordsplay

• kateshrewsday

My husband and my father share a love of puns.

We will be sat at the dinner table, replete with pie or some such stodgy fare, and someone will make the first pun. It will be pure wordsplay, and will be produced with a flourish worthy of Errol Flynn.

As we sat there, a few months ago, a squirrel arrived in the garden to ambush the nuts I leave out for the garden birds.

My affable brother simply suggested that we should call the Tree Police.

It had an effect similar to pulling the spring-loaded mechanism on a pinball machine. It sent a silver ball hurtling from pun-pillar to pun-post.

“Yes, special branch….” Phil chimed in. Not to be outdone, my father shot back: “They’ll root them out.”

“But perhaps the squirrel will twig?

“Oh, leaf it out….”

And it didn’t stop there, it never does. You’re barking. Don’t be a sap. It was like watching Wimbledon, back and forth, back and forth.

Eventually you would think that someone would be forced to concede; but in this case there are no rules to indicate when the game is over.

And in a way, I suppose the case is always kept open. There is always another word to add.

Today I read a post by my friend Kathy. She is absorbed, this day, with enchanting words. And hers enchanted me: she talks of love of words for the very sake of their sound and shape. Peerless wordsplay.

That sentimental Steve Martin remake of Cyrano De Bergerac, Roxanne, has the same delight in words. Set in a little town in the Pacific Northwest, this film, like its classic source, sums up all that is gallant about wordsplay. Words are the tools used by our hero to woo a beautiful and clever woman.

There’s that classic scene underneath the beautiful woman’s window, where the town’s erudite chief fireman  is feeding knockout lines to a good-looking, but very simple young man, in a bid to help him gain a foothold in her life.

The young man’s words are brash and blunt, and almost scare her away. It is up to the chief to rescue the situation. He tells the young man: “Say, I think you are afraid.”

This captures her lost attention, and she is immediately at the balcony to find out more. “What am I afraid of?” she asks.

The chief says, tell her this: You are afraid of words.

And the young man, for whom words go from his chief’s mind to his own mouth without connecting to any kind of intellect in between, mishears; and shouts to his beloved: You are afraid of worms, Roxanne. Worms.

Not the way to woo a lady.

Whenever anyone starts to talk of words, somewhere in my mind I am thinking of worms, because of one tiny letter. It has all the ingredients of the gallant gesture, but performed by an inept wordsman it falls flat and farcically funny.

A friend handed me an unassuming piece of paper on Monday. He had accompanied some children on a fantastical trip to a Tudor mansion.

Those at the mansion used words for adversarial play, and taught the children to do so too, in the most ingenious way I have ever seen.

It was to be carried out in Tudor costume, at a banquet fit for a king. And the girls had a different assignment from the boys.

The boys were charged with using Tudor words to formulate compliments. My piece of paper had strings of adjectives, compound adjectives and nouns which could be threaded together like beads.

So the ten-year-old-boys must arrive at the banquet and issue a compliment to a lady, in a bid to persuade her to dance.

They might call her a flowering, honey-tongued pigeon egg; a fruitful, sweet-suggesting true-penny; or a celestial, young-eyed smilet.

It was the girls’ job to rebuff their admirers in similar tongue.

The insults flowed with Elizabethan colour: “By my trowth, thou dost make the millstone seem as a feather what widst thy lard- bloated footfall!”

The words were like a luscious restaurant menu, a smorgasbord from which to select the insult of one’s dreams. Verily, ye be a knavish knotty-paled moldwarp, says one; thou art truly a mammering beetle-headed barnacle, quoth another.

And this is my favorite, one which identifies someone who has a big mouth: “In sooth, thy dank cavernous tooth-hole consumes all truth and reason!”

The more colourful the words, the more outrageous the risks one takes, the greater the delight it produces: wordsplay is eternally enchanting, and as seductive as a dashing swordsman, fighting a duel with devil-may-care gallantry.

There is only one way to end this post, and it, like these compliments and insults, comes from many a long year ago.

John Donne caught religion part-way through his poetic life. But before he did so, he used words to express romantic love: and to seduce.

And today his words still set the heart beating, if one can but hear them.

There are so many passionate plays on words to choose from: but my favourite is a set of words addressed to the sun itself.

There is no following these words: to try would be insipid. Wordsplay can amuse, it can enchant: but in the hands of Donne it simply sweeps one away.

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, “All here in one bed lay.”

She’s all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

32 thoughts on “Wordsplay”

  3. I too love puns, though they most often make folk groan, which doesn’t make me stop. I continue to punish them.
    (Groan? I can hear yours from here)

    I love your way of getting the children to attempt to use language in such a way! There is a website I found once which provides material for such things. I’ll see if I can find it.

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  6. Brutal! My father and my husband adore puns as well. It’s painful. I’m thankful they both live far apart so I am not frequently subjected to such torture. As yet I don’t think they realize they have this in common. After reading this, I’d like to keep it that way.

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    1. Do, Kristine. One can never keep dinner table conversation along civilised lines. It just keeps spiralling out of control following trains of random thought. Good to know puns haunt a fellow blogger too 🙂

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  7. I love kathys idea about the love of words for their sound and shape. Big al is experimenting with words and clearly loves the way they sound and indeed the response they raise! He refers to”nabbits’ whatever they may be and calls people a ‘ bellywim’ because he obviously thinks it sounds rude!

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  8. Words can be so fun- and you are such a master at making them do exactly what they were intended for at any given moment.
    Do forgive this long comment, but your post made me think of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead. Here’s a quote I find so amusing:

    Rosencrantz: What’s the matter with you today?
    Guildenstern: When?
    Rosencrantz: What?
    Guildenstern: Are you deaf?
    Rosencrantz: Am I dead?
    Guildenstern: Yes or no?
    Rosencrantz: Is there a choice?
    Guildenstern: Is there a God?
    Rosencrantz: Foul! No non sequiturs! Three… two, one game all.
    Guildenstern: What’s your name?
    Rosencrantz: What’s yours?
    Guildenstern: You first.
    Rosencrantz: Statement! One… love.
    Guildenstern: What’s your name when you’re at home?
    Rosencrantz: What’s yours?
    Guildenstern: When I’m at home?
    Rosencrantz: Is it different at home?
    Guildenstern: What home?
    Rosencrantz: Haven’t you got one?
    Guildenstern: Why do you ask?
    Rosencrantz: What are you driving at?
    Guildenstern: What’s your name?
    Rosencrantz: Repetition! Two… love. Match point.
    Guildenstern: Who do you think you are?
    Rosencrantz: Rhetoric! Game and match!

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    1. Thank you Zoe! This is such a brilliant addition to the wordsplay debate….What an amazing snippet, Stoppard is such a genius at this stuff. What a wordsman. Keeps one step ahead of you all the time.

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  10. Hot air or no, your words do flow!

    And I love them. And in writing my last post, before committing to the word cleave, I looked it up in my dictionary and sure enough it’s one of those words in English which defies common sense – One word which defines opposites – both to adhere too and to rent asunder. Without context, the speaker/reader would never know what the word means. Delights and astounds me because words and language are all about relationship(s) which at heart is everythingeverywhereallthetimeanyway.

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  12. A wonderful play on words from Flynn to Donne. I love Donne’s poems, one little explosion after another, like fireworks.

    Thanks for the link–you are an absolute celestial honey-tongued smilet.

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  13. I chanced upon your delightful blog and now , madam, you have cursed me for the day with this tree pun thing. The Tree of Life, examine your roots, he’s a shady fellow, he’s as tight(cheap) as the bark on a hickory tree, that wooden presence of Al Gore, when ships were made of wood and men of steel, wood you move closer to the campfire….and it’s on 5:30 AM here in Miami. I loved Errol Flynn as a child enchanted with pirates and ships and swords and such. As a history teacher in adult years I became a little picky. In sea battles they would cover the deck with sand to inhibit slipping in the blood of butchering each other and they they did not do that in that genre of old movies and cannonballs do not explode or cause fires. Well I will now begin to “lumber” through my day beginning with “sawing” through the “rain forest” of traffic.

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    1. Don’t get stuck in a logjam….ouch….
      How lovely, a comment out of the blue from someone with all the same persuasions as my nearest and dearest 🙂 Your ingenuity does this humble blog credit, sir.

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