Word play

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Word play is a literary technique in which the words that are used become the main subject of the work. Puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, and telling character names^{[clarification needed]} are common examples of word play.

Word play is quite common in oral cultures as a method of reinforcing meaning.

Examples of visual orthographic and sound-based word play abound in both alphabetically and non-alphabetically written literature (eg. Chinese).

Most writers engage in word play to some extent, but certain writers are particularly adept or committed to word play at length. Shakespeare's "quibbles" have made him a noted punster. P.G. Wodehouse was also hailed, by The Times as a "comic genius recognized in his lifetime as a classic and an old master of farce" for his ingenious wordplay.^{[citation needed]} James Joyce, author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is another noted word-player. For example, Joyce's phrase "they were yung and easily freudened" clearly conveys the meaning "young and easily frightened", but it also makes puns on the names of two famous psychoanalysts, Jung and Freud.

Other writers and entertainers closely identified with word play include:

• Lewis Carroll, in his Alice books, among other works
• A. A. Milne's poem In the dark in Now We Are Six has been noted as imitating crib talk, a form of monologue word play used by infants to practice phonology, syntax and conversational skills.^[1]
• Forrest J Ackerman, magazine editor, coined "sci-fi" ^{[2] [3]}
• The Apocryphal book of Susanna has elements of word play in its original Greek.
• Beck
• Elvis Costello
• Piers Anthony in his Xanth novels
• G. K. Chesterton
• Groucho Marx
• George Carlin
• Steven Wright
• Homer in his famous work "Odyssey"
• Brian P. Cleary in his Rhyme and PUNishment; Adventures in Wordplay
• Emo Philips, stand-up comedian, revered for his paraprosdokians and garden-path jokes
• Carrottop occasionally uses puns to work with his props
• Willard R. Espy, who collected several anthologies of word play
• Jasper Fforde
• Above (Artist)
• Jack Kerouac (in On the Road and more so in Visions of Cody)
• John Lennon (In His Own Write and A Spaniard In the Works) ("The Nasties Are Booming Us!")
• Max Collins, lead vocalist and lyricist of Eve 6
• Ove Michaelsen
• Alan Moore
• Dave Mustaine
• Vladimir Nabokov
• Flann O'Brien
• Van Dyke Parks
• Thomas Pynchon
• George Bernard Shaw
• Jason Mraz

Plays can enter common usage as neologisms.

Word play is closely related to word games, that is, games in which the point is manipulating words. See also language game for a linguist's variation.

See also

• Etymology
• Figure of speech
• List of forms of word play
• Metaphor
• Simile
• Word game

References

External links

• A categorized taxonomy of word play composed of record-holding words