Word play
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Word play is a literary technique in which the nature of the words used themselves become part of the subject of the work. Puns, phonetic mixups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, and telling character names are common examples of word play.
Most writers engage in word play to some extent, but certain writers are particularly adept or committed to word play. Shakespeare was a noted punster. P.G. Wodehouse was also hailed as a "comic genius recognized in his lifetime as a classic and an old master of farce" for his ingenious wordplay. 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 closely identified with word play include:
- Lewis Carroll in his Alice books
- Willard R. Espy, who collected several anthologies of word play
- Vladimir Nabokov
- George Bernard Shaw. The well-known spelling of fish as ghoti is often (but perhaps incorrectly) attributed to Shaw: "gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in station".
- Van Dyke Parks
- Thomas Pynchon
- Flann O'Brien
- Jasper Fforde
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. The Hungarian term for wordplay, occasionally used in the circle for its diaeres is Szójáték.
A taxonomy of word play together with record-holding words in each category is available here: Taxonomy of Wordplay
[edit] See also
- Acrostic
- Aleatory
- Alliteration
- Anagram
- Ananym
- Anglish
- Apronym
- Aptronym
- Autogram
- Blanagram
- Bushism
- Charactonym
- Chronogram
- Constrained writing
- Crab canon
- Diphthong
- Dog Latin
- Dysphemism
- Engrish
- Eponym
- Etymology
- Euphemism
- Figure of speech
- Haiku
- Holorime
- -izzle
- Kenning
- Letter bank
- Limerick
- Lipogram
- Logology
- Malapropism
- Metaphor
- Mondegreen
- Neologism
- Nerdcore
- Nominative determinism
- Onomatopoeia
- Opish
- Oronym
- Oxymoron
- Palindrome
- Pangram
- Pangrammatic window
- Paraprosdokian
- Pig Latin
- Portmanteau
- Prosody
- Pun
- RAS syndrome
- Rebus
- Recursive acronym
- Reverse-lipogram
- Retronym
- Rhyme
- Semordnilap
- Simile
- Slang
- Spanglish
- Spoonerism
- Transcription (linguistics)
- Ubbi dubbi
- Univocalic poetry
- Verbing
- Wit
