The Word Snoop

by Ursula Dubosarsky

  When the Word Snoop was at school, all the children in the playground spoke Pig Latin. Maybe your teacher knows it, or your parents, or your grandparents. But it’s not just old folks. Even Krusty the Clown on The Simpsons has been known to speak a bit of Pig Latin!

  Here’s how it works. It’s pretty easy, once you get the hang of it. Take away the first letter of the word you want to say, and put it at the end of that word. So for the word DOG, for example, take away the D and put it at the end, so you’ve got OG-D. Then you follow it by the two letters AY. That’s it! So DOG in Pig Latin becomes OG-DAY. Can you work out what CAT would be? Think about it. That’s right—AT-CAY!

  See! Easy-ay! Oh! That reminds me. There’s just one more rule. If a word begins with a vowel (a, e, i, o, u), then you just put AY on the end of the word, without taking the first letter away. So the word EASY, as you see, just becomes EASY-AY. And if a word begins with something like a CH or a TH or a SH, like SHAKE THAT CHOP, you take the whole sound, not just the first letter—AKE-SHAY AT-THAY OP-CHAY! (Not that hard!)

  At first it might seem difficult to remember, but once you get a bit of practice you’ll be able to say whole sentences quite easily. Somebody has even translated the Bible into Pig Latin. Wow! I mean, OW-WAY!

  Pig Latin is a game for the English language, but lots of other places in the world have similar secret languages that children love to play around with, although some of them are a lot more complicated than Pig Latin. In Argentina there’s something called Jeringozo,in France there’s Verlan,and in Japan, Ba-bi-bu-be-bo. Maybe you or someone you know speaks a language that has its own kind of Pig Latin?

  Can you work out what this message in Pig Latin means?

  ODAY-TAYIS-AYY-MAY

  IRTHDAY-BAY.

  AN-CAY OU-YAY OME-CAY

  O-TAY Y-MAY ARTY-PAY?

  MM-HAY. AYBE-MAY. I’LL-AYINK-THAY

  ABOUT-AYIT-AY.

  (Pssst! If you get stuck, check out the Answers page at the end of the chapter.)

  The Rebus

  This strange-looking sentence is called a rebus, which is a kind of picture puzzle. Rebus is Latin for “by things,” and in a rebus sentence you use pictures of things in place of words or parts of words. The person reading the rebus has to use the pictures to work out what it means.

  Sometimes in a rebus you simply use a picture instead of a word, so a picture of a cat is used for the word cat. But in a true rebus, the pictures don’t mean what they look like, they mean what they soundlike. So in the rebus at the top of the page, the picture of an eye doesn’t mean “eye,” it means “I,” which is another word that sounds the same. And the picture of the can doesn’t mean a can of beans, but the word can,meaning “able to.” See if you can work out the whole sentence now.

  This way of communicating words through pictures has been around for thousands of years, going back as far as some of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Rebuses are handy if you have a lot of people who can’t read, so they were popular in the Middle Ages, especially for things like coats of arms. Sometimes these were jokes—for example, the coat of arms of a family named Islip has a picture of an eye, and then a man falling out of a tree. (I-slip, get it?) Hmm, could you make up a rebus like this for your surname?

  Over the years, rebuses have appeared in lots of unusual places. For example, the sixteenth-century artist Leonardo da Vinci, who painted the famous Mona Lisa,was fascinated by rebuses and sometimes put them in his paintings. In 1661 a Norwegian poet, Nils Thomasson, published a long wedding poem of rebuses, together with a set of instructions on how to make them up. Later, in the eighteenth century, rebuses were used as a kind of code by people in France wanting to spread secret messages. And during the American Revolution, a rebus was a popular way to write a thank-you letter or even a love letter. Lewis Carroll, the English writer of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,also liked to send rebus letters, usually to children to make them laugh.

  If you look around nowadays, rebuses are everywhere—on the Internet, in advertisements, on T-shirts, even on television game shows. Often they use letters and numbers instead of pictures, like you do in text messages. So the number 4 will mean “for,” or the letter R stands for the word “are.”

  Why do people love rebuses so much? Well, the Austrian psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud believed it was a very natural way to think. He said that when you have a strange dream, you should look at it as a kind of rebus, where words and pictures and symbols and sounds are all mixed up together. So, if you dream about a big hand holding a key, maybe you’re really dreaming about your hankie. (Then again, it could just be someone trying to unlock the door . . .)

  Anyway, whatever the reason, rebuses are fun! Why don’t you make up some yourself? You could try single words to begin with, then see if you can do a whole sentence. Here’s one to get you started. Can you work it out?

  Rhyming Slang

  You may never have heard of rhyming slang, but I’m sure you can use your down the drain and work it out. (Hint: What rhymes with “drain”?)

  The rule of rhyming slang is that instead of a word, you say another word or name or phrase that rhymes with it. So instead of saying money, you say bread and honey,instead of mate, you say china plate,instead of a pie with tomato sauce, you say a dog’s eye with dead moss. (Erk, no thanks!)

  It’s like a code. That’s how rhyming slang is supposed to have started, actually, over a hundred years ago amongst people known as Cockneys from the East End of London in England. They are said to have invented it to keep things secret. This was particularly useful if you were a tea leaf on the run from the police, and you didn’t want to spend time in ginger ale. (Hint: What rhymes with “leaf ” and “ale”?)

  Rhyming slang quickly became popular in many other places in the world, and it’s still used today, with new rhymes being made up all the time. Have a Captain Cook at the dialog on the opposite page and see if you can work out what Mr. and Mrs. Rimer are really saying to each other.

  First to finish is the chicken dinner!

  Mr. and Mrs. Rimer at breakfast

  Mr. R: Good morning, treacle tart. How are you?

  Mrs. R: I had a terrible sleep, turtle dove.I was

  banging my head on the weeping willow all night.

  Mr. R:Tsk, tsk, that’s no good. I’ll put a bit of Uncle

  Fred in the roller coaster for you.

  Mrs. R: Hmm, thanks. Any lady in silk left in the

  Brooklyn Bridge?

  (There’s a noise outside)

  Mr. R: Excuse me a moment, my dear, I just heard

  a Highland fling at the door.

  (He goes out and returns with a set of keys.)

  Mrs. R: Who was that? One of the local dustbin lids?

  Mr. R:No, it was someone who found my macaroni

  and cheese on the field of wheat.

  Mrs. R:Well, isn’t that rubber ducky!

  Mr. R: Yes, so finish up your molten toffee and

  I’ll take you out for a nice spin in the jam jar.

  Hey there, clever Word Snoops. Another day, another code . . . See if you can work out the next part to my message. (Hint: Think rebus.)

  URA

  SECRET ←

  SECRET

  SECRET

  SECRET

  SECRET

  SECRET

  SECRET

  Answers

  PIG LATIN

  Today is my birthday. Can you come

  to my party?

  Hmm. Maybe. I’ll think about it.

  THE REBUS

  I wonder if you can guess what a rebus

  might be?

  The Word Snoop saw somebody eating

  a nice piece of cake.

  Dear Snoops,

  Tra-la-la!

  Do you like to sing? Words begin as sounds,

  just like music and singing. Writing only comes

  later. In this part of the book, I’m going to tell

  you about some of the weird and lovely t
hings

  I’ve discovered in my travels that have to do

  with the sounds of words.

  Writers love how words sound, sometimes

  even more than what they mean. Plays,

  poems, novels—so much writing is full of

  puns, homophones, onomatopoeia, as

  well as other playful things like anagrams,

  acronyms, oxymorons, tautologies, lipograms,

  palindromes . . .

  Gosh! Is that the time? I’d better be going.

  I’ve got some more snooping to do . . .

  Abyssinia! (I’ll be seeing ya, get it?)

  The Whirred’sNoop

  7.

  Say that again!

  Puns

  Knock knock!

  Who’s there?

  Lena.

  Lena who?

  Lean a little closer and I’ll tell you.

  Do you know what a pun is? If you laughed at this joke, then maybe you do! A pun is a way of using a word (or words) so that it has more than one meaning. So in this joke, Lena is a girl’s name, but it also sounds the same as “lean a.” HAHAHAHA! (You can stop laughing now.)

  Puns make us laugh because they take our brains by surprise, like seeing a funny picture when you’re not expecting it. Most knock-knock jokes use puns. Nobody knows who invented the knock-knock joke, but they seem to have begun in the 1950s with school children in South Africa. Now there are millions of them out there. Plenty of other types of jokes use puns as well. See if you can spot the double meanings in the ones on the next page.

  Shops and businesses often use puns in their Q. Why did Cinderella get kicked off

  the soccer team?

  A. Because she ran away from the ball.

  Q. What’s the difference between your

  teacher and a train?

  A. A train says CHOO CHOO and your

  teacher says “SPIT OUT THAT GUM!”

  names. A shop that specializes in reading glasses could be called Special-Eyes,for example, or a shop that washes your dog could be The Laundro-Mutt (like Laundromat—get it?). Have you seen some others?

  Sometimes writers use puns to make you laugh and think at the same time—the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde was an expert at these sorts of witty puns. Even the title of his most famous play is a pun, The Importance of Being Earnest—Ernest is a man’s name and earnest means “to be honest.”

  But puns don’t have to be funny. Another Irishman, Samuel Beckett, loved puns so much he even wrote in one of his very serious novels, “In the beginning was the pun.” (So then what happened?) And in the play Romeo and Julietby William Shakespeare, when one of the characters is dying after being stabbed in a fight he says: “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” (Because grave means “serious” as well as—stop laughing, it’s not funny!)

  Be warned, puns won’t always make you popular. The most common response to a good pun is a big GROAN . . . As Lewis Carroll, who was rather fond of puns himself, said:The Good and Great must ever shun

  That reckless and abandoned one

  Who stoops to perpetrate a pun.

  Anyway, don’t worry about that. Everyone knows that children come up with all the best puns. I bet you can think of plenty.

  Have a pun time!

  Homophones

  Puns depend for the most part on something called homophones. A homophone is the name people use when you have two or more words that sound exactly the same but have different meanings, and are sometimes spelled differently too. It comes from (you guessed it!) two ancient Greek words—homos, meaning “same,” and phonos, meaning “sound.”

  All languages have homophones. It’s pretty natural, given all the things and ideas in the world, and how most languages use a limited number of sounds. Chinese is thought to have the most homophones of all, but English has quite a few too. You can find lists of them on the Internet, and in libraries there are whole books of them.

  Some homophones in English are thought to have come about because of that rather drastic event I told you of before, The Great Vowel Shift (gulp!), when people started changing the way they said their vowels. So, for example, the words meet and meat weren’t homophones originally, as they were pronounced differently (the word meat used to sound more like “mate”). In the same way, whether something is a homophone or not depends on how you pronounce English. For example, the words offal and awful are homophones for some English speakers, but not others. (How offally confusing!)

  Yes, well, homophones can be confusing. That’s why when you’re reading you really have to be grateful for all those silent letters and strange spellings that English is full of. (I knew there had to be something good about all that!) In a book or a story, you’ll never mistake a knight for a night, or a symbol for a cymbal, or “I would like a two, too” for “I would like a tutu.”

  Unless it was a particularly strange story . . .

  Mondegreens

  Oh my darling, oh my darling,

  Oh my darling, lemon pie!

  You are lost and gone forever

  Dreadful sorry, lemon pie.

  Gee, what a sad song! Poor person, to lose their lemon pie. Could someone get me a hankie?

  Hang on a minute. What kind of person sings such a sad song about losing their darling lemon pie? Well, nobody, actually. This is just how some people hear the words of the song “Oh My Darling, Clementine.” Sometimes, especially when everyone sings together, the words aren’t very clear, and “Clementine” can sound a bit like lemon pie. Say it aloud for yourself a few times, and you’ll see what I mean.

  This is something called a mondegreen. It’s what happens when we hear words without reading them and our brains have to work out what we think is being said or, more often, sung. The writer Sylvia Wright invented the word in 1954 from something she misheard as a child in a poem her mother used to recite:“They have slain the Earl of Murray,

  And they laid him on the green.”

  which she heard as:“They have slain the Earl of Murray,

  And the Lady Mondegreen.”

  Poor Lady Mondegreen!

  Mondegreens happen because of all the homophones and oronyms in English, which are words and groups of words that sound similar but are spelled differently and mean different things. Mondegreens are mistakes, but they’re fun and interesting mistakes. They show us how we listen—first for sounds, then words, then meaning. And they can also reveal things about the mind of the person who does the mishearing . . .

  There are lots of mondegreens out there. Do you know the book Olive the Other Reindeer by Vivian Walsh and J.otto Seibold? The title comes from a mondegreen in the Christmas carol “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” where “all of the other reindeer” has been misheard by children for years as Olive, the other reindeer.Now Olive is famous!

  Probably the funniest mondegreens are from pop songs, like there’s a bathroom on the right for “there’s a bad moon on the rise,” or baking carrot biscuitsfor “taking care of business.” Sometimes people don’t realize for years (or ever) that the words could be anything else . . .

  I bet you can think of some words in songs or poems or prayers that you used to sing but found out later weren’t the original lyrics. In the meantime, see if you can work out what the mondegreens on the next page are.

  Mondegreens

  1. José, can you sing?

  2. Sleep in heavenly peas

  3. The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind

  4. Knock, knock, knocking on Kevin’s door

  Onomatopoeia

  WOW! That’s a hard word! Ono-mato-pee-a. Hmm. Actually, you probably use onomatopoeia every day. Like when you crunch on a very juicy apple and slurpas you lick all the juice from your face, or listen for the brrring of the bell when school’s over (at last!).

  The word onomatopoeia comes from ancient Greek. Onomameans “name,” and poeia means “making.” Onomatopoeia is when you use a name or word that makes the
sound of something, or at least suggests it somehow. For an easy example, remember the fights in Batman? POW! WHAM! SMASH! That’s onomatopoeia. Comic-book writers love it. In fact, there’s even an evil comic-book character called Onomatopoeia, who gets his name by imitating sounds, like the dripping of a faucet or a gun going off. (Keep away from him!)

  The words for animal sounds often use onomatopoeia, like moo for a cow, or quack for a duck. But the funny thing is, even though animals sound much the same all over the world, people who speak different languages make up different words for the sounds animals make. So, for example, in English a pig goes oink oink,but in Chinese it’s hu lu,in Croatian it’s rok rok,and in Portuguese croinh croinh.An Indonesian dog goes gong gong,a Russian dog gav gav,and an Albanian dog hum hum.Try that out next time you sing “Old Macdonald Had a Farm!”

  And it’s not just the animals. If you’re in Japan and someone cracks a joke, make sure you don’t say “ha ha ha,” because in Japan it’s hu hu hu.Or if you’re in Poland and you feel a big sneeze coming on, don’t say “aah-choo!” when you sneeze, say apsik!And luckily when the Word Snoop was in Bulgaria last summer and someone stepped on her toe, she remembered just in time to cry out “Ox!”