7
English at Play
Much of Chapter 6 dealt with the subject of English at work. The most distinctive and predictable varieties of the language are to be found in the vast range of jobs and professional activities which characterize modern society. The last part of the chapter began with the clergy and ended with truckers. But there are linguistic conventions to be followed for our leisure activities too – and especially whenever we ‘play’ with language, to convey effects which are intriguing, entertaining, endearing, or just plain funny.
The main characteristic of English at play is its readiness to depart from the norms of usage found elsewhere in the language. We break the rules to create a special effect – a strategy also found in literary writing (see Chapter 9). Jokes, riddles, graffiti, verbal contests, repartee, puns, and other forms of wit all rely on the speaker (or writer) doing something unexpected with language. The effect may be located at a single point, as in a pun or a ‘punch line’, or it may be a continuous, cumulative effect, as in the verbal repartee exchanged by rival street gangs, where each tries to out-swear the other.
In many cases there is a linguistic structure to the genre. Jokes often have stereotyped openings which make it possible to predict the sequence of events in the narrative. ‘There was an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman…’ means a three-part joke is to follow. Children’s jokes rely greatly on a predictable internal structure:
A: Knock knock.
B: Who’s there?
A: Arthur.
B: Arthur who?
A: Arthur [‘alf a] minute and I’ll find out.
Once the structure is well-established, it can accept deviations which break the expected sequence:
A: Knock knock.
B: Who’s there?
A: Doctor.
B: Doctor who?
A: That’s right.
Graffiti rules OK
The ‘— rules OK’ motif provides one of the best examples of a successful humour framework – used mainly as a source of graffiti. Here are a few examples, taken from walls in recent years. They clearly show the ingenious ways in which linguistic departures can be introduced from a simple norm.
Town criers rule, okez, okez, okez!
Sycophancy rules – if it’s OK by you.
Scots rule, och aye!
Anarchy, no rules, OK?
Procrastination will rule one day, OK?
Apathy ru
Mañuel rules, Oh-Oué?
Synonyms govern, all right?
Roget’s Thesaurus dominates, regulates, rules, all right, agreed.
Other well-known stereotyped structures include such openings as ‘Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup’, ‘What do you get if you cross an [ANIMAL] with an [ANIMAL]?’, and ‘What did the [NOUN] say to the [NOUN]?’ In each case, a standard stimulus permits an almost infinite number of possible responses.
Riddles are more complex, from the point of view of meaning, but their structure often resembles that of a joke. Riddling is an intellectual verbal game: an utterance is made which is intended to mystify or mislead.
From: Cartoons from Punch (Robson Books, 1979)
Events, people, animals, or objects are described in such a way that the description suggests something different. The recipient of the riddle has to resolve the ambiguity. In English, riddles are usually quite short, and are found largely in children’s games and conversation.
What has two legs and flies? A pair of trousers.
But longer riddles can be found. ‘Why are fire engines red?’, in one version, has a twelve-line response:
One and one are two.
Two and two are four.
Three times four is twelve.
There are twelve inches in a ruler.
Queen Mary was a ruler.
Queen Mary ruled the sea.
There are fish in the sea.
The fish have fins.
The Finns fought the Russians.
The Russians are red.
Fire engines are always rushin’.
That’s why fire engines are red.
Occasionally, riddles will express a more serious purpose, such as in narratives where they are a test of a hero’s wisdom or worthiness. In one famous case, Oedipus was required to solve the riddle of the sphinx: ‘What has one voice, and walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and on three in the evening?’ (The answer was a man, seen as a baby, an adult, and an old man with a stick.) Riddles of this kind are not restricted to single cultures, but turn up in riddle collections all over the world – including English.
The competitive element in riddling relates it to verbal duels and speech events where linguistic skill confers social status. In the USA, breakdancing has its correlate in fast-talking, or ‘rapping’, in which long sequences of rhyming lines are produced at speed to a fixed rhythm:
... Always have fun
Always on the run
Can’t rap now
Till I see the sun
You see twenty dollars
Laying on the ground
Try to pick it up
But it moved across town…
The oldest English riddles
The Exeter Book, the oldest collection of English poetry, contains ninety-five riddles, probably dating from the eighth century. The riddles are generally written in the first person. Here is R. K. Gordon’s translation of the ‘Anchor’ riddle:
Often I must war against the wave and fight against the wind; I contend against them combined, when, buried by the billows, I go to seek the earth; my native land is strange to me. If I grow motionless I am mighty in the conflict; if I succeed not in that they are stronger than I, and straightway with rending they put me to rout; they wish to carry off what I must keep safe. I foil them in that if my tail endures and if the stones are able to hold fast against me in my strength. Ask what is my name.
In more aggressive displays, taunts, boasts, name-calling, and various kinds of insult may be traded in lengthy exchanges. Among black American youths in ghetto areas, these exchanges are variously known as ‘sounding’, ‘signifying’, ‘woofing’ or ‘playing the dozens’. A sequence of ritual insults (‘raps’) is followed by a series of replies (‘caps’). Such duels seem to act as a way of finding out the social structure of the peer group. Members can discover and test the dominance of others, without recourse to fighting or bloodshed. Words not war.
Insult duels, politeness contests and boasting rituals have a long history in English. One of the earliest exchanges is recorded in the Old English poem the Battle of Maldon (AD 991) between the English and Danish leaders. In more recent times, the West Indian calypso was originally a type of verbal insult, directed at political figures. In the Middle Ages, these verbal attacks, known as ‘flyting’, were sometimes developed at length. Some of the best invective is found in William Dunbar’s poem ‘The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie’ (early sixteenth century). The exact meaning of some of the words is uncertain, but there is no doubt about their purpose:
Mauch muttoun, byt buttoun, peilit gluttoun, air to Hilhous;
Rank beggar, ostir dregar, foule fleggar in the flet;
Chittirlilling, ruch lilling, lik schilling in the milhous;
Baird rehator, theif of natur, fals tratour, feyindis gett;
Filling of tauch, rak sauch, cry crauch, thow art oursett;
Muttoun dryver, girnall ryver, yadswyvar, fowll fell the;
Herretyk, lunatyk, puspyk, carlingis pet,
Rottin crok, dirtin drok, cry cok, or I sall quell the.
It is of course possible to insult people in more indirect and subtle ways, using sarcasm, loaded language, metaphor, puns, and other such devices. It is all word-play, whether the intent is jocular or serious. And word-play has an enormous range, being found in every conceivable linguistic context and used to express most emotions and subject-matters. Puns, for example, show this range very clearly. They are common enough in everyday contexts, where they are frequ
ently heard (and enjoyed or condemned, according to taste) in conversation. They are the stock-in-trade of comedians (‘What did the circus manager say to the human cannonball who wanted to leave? Where shall I find another man of your calibre!’). They are a fruitful source of effects in advertising (‘Stick with us’, advertising glue). And newspaper editors – in certain papers, at least – use them in headlines and sub-headings (‘Check, mate’, introducing an article about a chess-enthusiast not being allowed to leave the Soviet Union).
Too many of these examples would make us ill. For some people, puns are, as John Dryden claimed, ‘the lowest and most grovelling form of wit’. They are not found with equal frequency in all parts of the English-speaking world: they are much less popular in the USA than in Britain, for example. On the other hand, word-play graces the most revered literature. Without puns, much of the pungency and humour of Shakespeare’s writing would be lost. ‘Ask for me tomorrow,’ says the dying Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, ‘and you shall find me a grave man.’ And possibly the most famous pun of all time is in the New Testament: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church’ – a pun which works better in French where, as in Latin, the same word is used for both Peter and rock (pierre).
English laughs at itself
The subject-matter of the jokes, puns, and riddles illustrated so far has been, in effect, life, the universe, and everything. But there is another level of linguistic play where the English language itself is the subject-matter. Under this heading come the many dialect joke-books, in which people laugh at the accents and vocal mannerisms of English users from different parts of the country or from different countries. Perhaps the most famous of these books was Let Stalk Strine (Australian), published in 1965, by Afferbeck Lauder, said to be Professor of Strine Studies at the University of Sinny. He uses standard spellings to represent the popular impression of a broad Australian accent (see p. 257), with bizarre results:
Jezz: Articles of furniture. As in: ‘Set the tible, love, and get a coupler jezz’.
Scona: A meteorological term. As in: ‘Scona rine’.
X: The twenty-fourth letter of the strine alphabet; also plural of egg; also a tool for chopping wood.
The same kind of satire has been levelled at Liverpool speech in Lern Yerself Scouse (1966), by Frank Shaw, Fritz Spiegl and Stan Kelly:
Ullo dur! Greetings; I am pleased to make your acquaintance.
Gisalite. Could you oblige me with a match, please.
Ere, tatty-head! I say, young woman.
And a Texas speech by Jim Everhart in The Illustrated Texas Dictionary of the English Language (1968):
all: petroleum, as in ‘They found all on mah land!’
slave: the part of the garment covering an arm only.
stars: a flight of steps.
And at most British dialects by Sam Llewellyn, in Yacky dar moy bewty! (1985). East Anglian English, for instance:
Hilloo, bor! Excuse me!
Oi oont noo where I em. I am lost.
Blass that int noo bledda good. Oh dear.
Comic alphabets
The English alphabet has often been the butt of humour. There are hundreds of poems and puns based on reciting the letters in order. Widely known in the nineteenth century, they seem to have originated as an adult reflex of the rhyming alphabets which came to be used in schools (‘A for an Apple, an Archer, and Arrow; B for a Bull, a Bear, and a Barrow’, etc.). A selection of entries from Eric Partridge’s Comic Alphabets (1961) runs as follows:
A for ’orses
B for mutton
C for yourself
D for dumb
(deaf or dumb)
E for brick
(heave a brick)
F for vescence
G for police
(chief of police)
H for beauty
(age before beauty)
I for Novello
J for oranges
(Jaffa oranges)
K for teria
(cafeteria)
L for leather
M for sis
(emphasis)
N for mation
O for the rainbow
P for soup
Q for the bus
R for ’mo
(half a moment)
S for you
(as for you)
T for two
U for me
V for la compagnie
(Vive la compagnie)
W for a quid
(double you – betting)
X for breakfast
Y for mistress
(wife or mistress)
Z for the doctor
(send for the doctor)
But these are only some of the possibilities. Under A, for example, we find A for ism, A for gardener (Ava Gardner) and A for mentioned (afore). Under N, N for a dig (infra dig), N for a penny (in for a penny), N for lope (envelope) and N for laying (hen). Under Q, we also find Q for billiards (cue) and Q gardens (Kew). And under Y, several variants on ‘wife’ – Y for lover, Y for husband, Y for secretary, Y for nagging – as well as Y for fishing (Wye) and Y for crying out loud!
Or Hampshire English:
This be a jarming caddage. What a charming cottage!
Thankee, muss. Thank you, madam.
Un’s got meece, vurlikely. It has probably got mice.
Few distinctive accents and dialects have escaped this kind of treatment. Nor are upper class accents exempt. If you want to learn to talk like the Queen, or like the Sloane Square set, there is no shortage of facetious manuals to help you on your way.
Word games
Another way in which we play with the English language is through the phenomenon of word games. People seem to delight in pulling words apart and reconstituting them in a novel guise, arranging them into clever patterns, finding hidden meanings in them, and trying to use them according to specially invented rules. Word puzzles and competitions are to be found in newspapers, at house parties, in schools, on radio and television, and in all kinds of individual contexts for many years – as when an adult completes a crossword, or a child plays a game of Hangman. One of the most successful games on British television for many years was ‘Blankety Blank’, in which people had to guess which word filled a blank in a familiar phrase. Another was ‘Call my Bluff’, where the participants had to decide which of three possible meanings belonged to an unfamiliar word. The majority of TV games, in fact, seem to contain some kind of language element.
The crossword is undoubtedly the most popular of all word games. It was devised in the USA in 1913 by a journalist, Arthur Wynne, as a newspaper puzzle called a ‘word cross’, and it quickly became a craze. But for anyone who has tried it, writing a good puzzle turns out to be far more difficult than solving it. The construction of the interlocking words within the puzzle is not the issue: the main problem is devising clues which are ingeniously ambiguous, but do not unintentionally mislead. The more difficult puzzles make use of cryptic clues, which require the solver to understand several special conventions. An anagram might be signalled by a figure of speech expressing disorder, such as ‘A youth is all mixed up…’ If the clue contains a parenthetic phrase such as ‘we hear’, similar-sounding words are involved. Punning clues often end with an exclamation or question mark. And a large number of conventional expressions are used to symbolize certain letters, such as left (= L), north (= N), a sailor (= AB), or a thousand (= M). In the specialized world of the ‘serious’ crossword compilers, the rules governing the construction of clues are strictly adhered to, and much pleasure is obtained by making them really difficult and ingenious. In Britain, the symbol of this state of mind has been the choice of pseudonyms of some of the great compilers: Torquemada, Ximenes, and Azed (Deza in reverse) – all names of leaders of the Spanish Inquisition!
The boundary between word games and the world of secret messages and codes is a difficult one to draw. So is the boundary between a game, a hobby, and an obsession. Some of the e
xamples below move in the direction of these other headings. And the last example in the chapter is very definitely not a game to those who practise it.
Acrostics are compositions, usually in verse, which arrange certain letters within a text to form a word, phrase, or special pattern. Some are written as puzzles; in others, there is no attempt to conceal the ‘answer’. Generally, the initial letter of each line provides the clue, but sometimes the pattern is based on the last letter of the line (a telestich), combinations of first and last letters (a double acrostic), or even more complex sequences. Acrostics are commonly used in mnemonics; for example, ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Favour’ is one way of remembering the names of the notes on the lines in the treble clef.
Word squares are sequences of letters using words of equal length which read in horizontal, vertical, and occasionally diagonal directions. Usually the words are the same in each direction, but in double word squares, they read differently: O R A L
M A R E
E V E N
N E A T
Some nine-word squares have been constructed in English, containing place names and several rare words, but so far no ten-word squares using ten different words have been completed, even with the help of a computer.
Q U A R E L E S T
U P P E R E S T E
A P P O I N T E R
R E O M E T E R S
E R I E V I L L E
L E N T I L L I N
E S T E L L I N E
S T E R L I N G S
The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language Page 12
