The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

15. Wordplay

Six days a week an Englishman named Roy Dean sits down and does in a matter of minutes something that many of us cannot do at all: He completes the crossword puzzle in the London Times. Dean is the, well, the dean of the British crossword. In 1970, under test conditions, he solved a Times crossword in just 3 minutes and 45 seconds, a feat so phenomenal that it has stood unchallenged for twenty years.

Unlike American crosswords, which are generally straightforward affairs, requiring you merely to fit a word to a definition, the British variety are infinitely more fiendish, demanding mastery of the whole armory of verbal possibilities—puns, anagrams, palindromes, lipograms, and whatever else springs to the deviser’s devious mind. British crosswords require you to realize that carthorse is an anagram of orchestra, that contaminated can be made into no admittance, that emigrants can be transformed into streaming, Cinerama into American, Old Testament into most talented, and World Cup team into (a stroke of genius, this one) talcum powder. (How did anyone ever think of that?) To a British crossword enthusiast, the clue “An important city in Czechoslovakia” instantly suggests Oslo. Why? Look at Czech(OSLO)vakia again. “A seed you put in the garage” is caraway, while “HIJKLMNO” is water because it is H-to-O or H₂O. Some clues are cryptic in the extreme. The answer to “Sweetheart could take Non-Commissioned Officer to dance” is flame. Why? Well, a noncommissioned officer is an NCO. Another word for sweetheart is flame. If you add NCO to flame you get flamenco, a kind of dance. Get it? It is a wonder to me that anyone ever completes them. And yet many Britons take inordinate pride not just in completing them but in completing them quickly. A provost at Eton once boasted that he could do The Times crossword in the time it took his morning egg to boil, prompting one wag to suggest that the school may have been Eton but the egg almost certainly wasn’t.

According to a Gallup poll, the crossword is the most popular sedentary recreation, occupying thirty million Americans for part of every day. The very first crossword, containing just thirty-two clues, appeared in the New York World on December 21, 1913. It had been thought up as a space filler by an expatriate Englishman named Arthur Wynne, who called it a word-cross. (Remember what I said about inventors never quite getting the name right?) It became a regular feature in the World, but nobody else picked it up until April 1924 when a fledgling publishing company called Simon and Schuster brought out a volume of crossword puzzles, priced at $1.35. It was an immediate hit and two other volumes were quickly produced. By the end of the first year the company had sold half a million copies, and crossword puzzles were a craze across America—so much so that for a time the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad installed dictionaries in each of its cars for the convenience of puzzle-solving travelers who had an acute need to know that Iliamna is the largest lake in Alaska or that oquassa is a kind of freshwater fish.

Despite this huge popularity, the most venerable papers on both sides of the Atlantic refused for years to acknowledge that the crossword was more than a passing fad. The Times of London held out until January 1930, when it finally produced its first crossword (devised by a Norfolk farmer who had never previously solved one, much less constructed one). To salve its conscience at succumbing to a frivolous game, The Times printed occasional crosswords in Latin. Its namesake in New York held out for another decade and did not produce its first crossword until 1942.

Only one other word game has ever challenged the crossword puzzle for popularity and respectability, and that’s Scrabble. Scrabble was introduced by a games company called Selchow and Righter in 1953, though it had been invented, by one Alfred Butts, more than twenty years earlier in 1931. Butts clearly didn’t have too much regard for which letters are used most often in English. With just ninety-eight tiles, he insisted on having at least two of each letter, which means that q, j, and z appear disproportionately often. As a result, success at Scrabble generally involves being able to come up with obscure words like zax (a hatchetlike tool) and xi (the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet). Butts intentionally depressed the number of s’s to discourage the formation of plurals, though he compensated by increasing the number of i’s to encourage the formation of suffixes and prefixes. The highest score, according to Alan Richter, a former British champion writing in The Atlantic in 1987, was 3,881 points. It included the word psychoanalyzing, which alone was worth 1,539 points.

Wordplay is as old as language itself, and about as various. As Tony Augarde notes in his scholarly and yet endlessly absorbing Oxford Guide to Word Games, many verbal pastimes go back to the furthest reaches of antiquity. Palindromes, sentences that read the same backwards as forwards, are at least 2,000 years old. The ancient Greeks often put “Nispon anomimata mi monan opsin” on fountains. It translates as “Wash the sin as well as the face.” The Romans admired them, too, as demonstrated by “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni” (“We enter the circle after dark and are consumed by fire”), which was said to describe the action of moths. The Romans also liked anagrams—scrambling the letters of a word or phrase to form new words or phrases—and turned “Quid est veritas?” (“What is truth?”) into “Est vir qui adest” (“It is this man here”).

Among the earliest instances of wordplay, Augarde cites a Greek anagram dating from the third century B.C. and, earlier still, a lipogram by the Greek Lasus from the fifth century B.C. in which the poet intentionally avoided using the letter s. So it is safe to say that wordplay is very old and effectively universal. Even Christ reputedly made a pun when He said: “Thou art Peter: upon this rock I shall build my Church.” It doesn’t make a lot of sense from the wordplay point of view until you realize that in ancient Greek the word for Peter and for rock was the same.

Wordplay in English is as old as our literature. In the eighth century A.D., Cynewulf, one of the first English poets, wrote four otherwise serious religious poems into each of which he artfully wove acrostics of his own name, presumably for no other reason than that it amused him. Verbal japes of one type or another have been a feature of English literature ever since. Shakespeare so loved puns that he put 3,000 of them—that’s right, 3,000—into his plays, even to the extent of inserting them in the most seemingly inappropriate places, as when in King Henry IV, Part I, the father of Hotspur learns of his son’s tragic death and remarks that Hotspur is now Coldspur. The most endearing names in English literature, from Lewis Carroll to James Joyce, have almost always been associated with wordplay. Even Samuel Johnson, as we have seen, managed to insert a number of jokes into his great dictionary—an action that would be inconceivable in other languages.

The varieties of wordplay available in English are almost without number—puns, tongue-twisters, anagrams, riddles, cryptograms, palindromes, clerihews, rebuses, crossword puzzles, spelling bees, and so on ad infinitum. Their effect can be addictive. Lewis Carroll, an obsessive deviser and player of wordgames, once sat up all night trying to make an anagram of William Ewart Gladstone before settling on “Wild agitator, means well.” Some diligent scholar, whose identity appears now to be lost, set his attention on that famous Shakespearean nonce word in Love’s Labour’s Lost, honorificabilitudinitatibus, and concluded that it must contain an anagram proving that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays, and came up with “Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi,” which translates as “These plays, born of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world.” Think of the hours of labor that that must have involved. According to the Guinness Book of Records, a man in the English county of Hereford & Worcester wrote a palindrome of 65,000 words in 1983. Whether or not it makes much sense—and I would almost bet my house that it doesn’t—we can but admire the dedication that must have gone into it.

Possibly the most demanding form of wordplay in English—or indeed in any language—is the palindrome. The word was first used in English by Ben Jonson in 1629. A good palindrome is an exceedingly rare thing. Most of them require a generosity of spirit to say that they make much sense, as in “Mad Zeus, no live devil, lived evil on Suez dam” or “Stiff, O dairyman, in a myriad of fits” or “Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts,” all three of which deserve an A+ for length and a D– for sensibility. Or else they involve manipulations of spelling, as the short but notable “Yreka Bakery” or the rather more venerable “Lewd I did live, & evil did I dwel.” This last, according to Willard R. Espy in The Game of Words, was written by the English poet John Taylor and is the first recorded palindrome in English, though in fact it isn’t really a palindrome since it only works if you use an ampersand instead of and.

The reason there are so many bad palindromes, of course, is that they are so very difficult to construct. So good ones are all the more cherishable for their rarity. Probably the most famous palindrome is one of the best. It manages in just seven words to tell an entirely sensible story: “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!” That is simply inspired. Others that have the virtue of making at least some kind of sense:

Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron.

Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?

Too far, Edna, we wander afoot.

Madam, I’m Adam.

Sex at noon taxes.

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

Able was I ere I saw Elba.

Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus.

Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.

This last, I realize, does not even begin to pass the plausibility test, but so what? Anyone ingenious enough to work oscillate, metallic, and sonatas into one palindrome is exempt from all requirements bearing on sense. The Greeks and Romans also had a kind of palindrome in which it is the words rather than the letters that are read in reverse order—rather as if the English sentence “Jack loves Jill, not Jane” had its word order reversed to read “Jane, not Jill, loves Jack,” giving an entirely new sense. This kind of palindrome has never caught on in the English-speaking world, largely because English doesn’t lend itself to it very well. I’ve been working on it most of the afternoon (I told you wordplay is addictive) and the best I can come up with is “Am I as stupid as you are?” which reads backwards as well as forwards but, alas, keeps the same sense in both directions.

Not far removed from the palindrome is the anagram, in which the letters of a word or name are jumbled to make a new, and ideally telling, phrase. Thus “Ronald Wilson Reagan” becomes “Insane Anglo Warlord”; “Spiro Agnew” becomes “Grow a Penis.” Again, one can but gasp at the ingenuity and dedication that have gone into some of them. What kind of mind is it that can notice that “two plus eleven” and “one plus twelve” not only give the same result but use the same letters? Other famous or notable anagrams:

Western Union = no wire unsent

circumstantial evidence = can ruin a selected victim

a stitch in time saves nine = this is meant as incentive

William Shakespeare = I am a weakish speller (or) I like Mr. W. H. as a pal, see? (or) We all make his praise

funeral = real fun

The Morse Code = Here come dots

Victoria, England’s Queen = governs a nice quiet land

parishioners = I hire parsons

intoxicate = excitation

schoolmaster = the classroom

mother-in-law = woman Hitler

Another form of wordplay is the rebus, a kind of verbal riddle in which words and symbols are arranged in a way that gives a clue to the intended meaning. Can you, for example, guess the meaning of this address?

Wood

John

Mass

It is “John Underwood, Andover, Massachusetts.” Many books and articles on word games say that such an address was once put on an envelope and that the letter actually got there, which suggests either that the postal service was once a lot better or writers more gullible than they are now. These days the rebus is a largely forgotten form, except on American license plates, where owners sometimes feel compelled to tell you their name or what they do for a living (like the doctor who put SAY AH), pose a metaphysical question (Y ME) or a provocative one (RUNVS), or just offer a friendly farewell (ALLBCNU). My favorite was the license plate on a truck from a McDonald’s Farm that just said EIEIO. If nothing else, these vanity plates tell us something about the spirit of the age. According to a 1984 report in the Los Angeles Times,[10] the most frequently requested plate in 1970 was PEACE. By 1984 that had been replaced by GO FOR IT.

The French, in accordance with their high regard for the cerebral, have long cultivated a love of wordplay. In the Middle Ages, they even had a post of Anagrammatist to the King. One of the great French wordplayers was the novelist Georges Perec, who before his early death in 1982 was a guiding force in the group called OuLiPo (for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), whose members delighted in setting themselves complex verbal challenges. Perec once wrote a novel without once using the letter e (such compositions are called lipograms) and also composed a 5,000-letter palindrome on the subject of, you guessed it, palindromes.

An example of a French rebus is “Ga = I am very hungry.” To understand it you must know that in French capital G (“G grand”) and small a (“a petit”) are pronounced the same as “J’ai grand appétit.” N’est-ce-pas? But the French go in for many other games, including some we don’t have. One of the more clever French word games is the holorime, a two-line poem in which each line is pronounced the same but uses different words. As you will quickly see from the following example, sense often takes a backseat to euphony in these contrivances:

“Par le bois du Djinn, ou s’entasse de l’éffroi,

“Parle! Bois du gin, ou cent tasses de lait froid!”

It translates roughly as “When going through the Djinn’s woods, surrounded by so much fear, keep talking. Drink gin or a hundred cups of cold milk.” We have the capacity to do this in English—​“I love you” and “isle of view” are holorimic phrases and there must be an infinity of others. William Safire cites the American grandmother who thought that the line in the Beatles’ song about “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” was “the girl with colitis goes by,” which would seem to offer rich potential to budding holorimistes. A rare attempt to compose an English holorime was made by the British humorist Miles Kington (from whom the previous example is quoted) in 1988 when he offered the world this poem, called A Lowlands Holiday Ends in Enjoyable Inactivity:

“In Ayrshire hill areas, a cruise, eh, lass?

“Inertia, hilarious, accrues, hélas.”

From this I think we can conclude that the definitive English holorime has yet to be written. However, an old children’s riddle does seem to come close. It is the one that poses the question “How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?” The answer: (1) a sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane; (2) an inclined plane is a slope up; (3) a slow pup is a lazy dog.

We may not have holorimes in English, but we do have tricks that the French don’t have. Clerihews, for instance. Named after their deviser, one E. Clerihew Bentley, an English journalist, they are pithy poems that always start with someone’s name and purport, in just four lines, to convey the salient facts of the subject’s life. To wit:

Sir Humphry Davy

Detested gravy.

He lived in the odium

Of having invented sodium.

The closest America has come to producing an equivalent to clerihews were the Burma-Shave signs that graced U.S. highways for half a century. Devised in 1926 by Allan Odell, son of the founder of the Burma-Shave company, these consisted of five or six signs spaced one hundred feet apart which give a witty sales jingle for Burma-Shave shaving cream. Some examples: “A peach / looks good / with lots of fuzz / but man’s no peach / and never was. / BURMA-SHAVE.” Or “Don’t take a curve / at 60 per. / We hate to lose / a customer. / BURMA-SHAVE.” Some of the best ones never made it to the roadside because they were considered too risqué for the time. For instance: “If wifie shuns / your fond embrace / don’t shoot / the iceman / feel your face.” As recently as the 1960s, there were still 7,000 sets of Burma-Shave signs along American roadsides. But the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 put an end to the erection of any new ones, and the old ones were quickly whisked away by souvenir hunters. Now they are so much a thing of the past that a publicity woman at American Safety Razor, the company that now owns the Burma-Shave name, had never even heard of them.

We have a deep-rooted delight in the comic effect of words in English, and not just in advertising jingles but at the highest level of endeavor. As Jespersen notes: “No literature in the world abounds as English does in characters made ridiculous to the reader by the manner in which they misapply or distort ‘big’ words,”[11] and he cites, among others, Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop, Fielding’s Mrs. Slipslop, Dickens’s Sam Weller, and Shakespeare’s Mrs. Quickly.

All of these were created for comic effect in plays and novels, but sometimes it comes naturally, as with that most famous of word muddlers, the Reverend William Spooner, warden of New College at Oxford University from 1903 to 1924, whose habitual transposition of sounds—metaphasis is the technical term—made him famous in his own lifetime and gave the world a word: spoonerism. A little-known fact about Spooner was that he was an albino. He was also famously boring, a shortcoming that he himself acknowledged when he wrote plaintively of his sermons in his diary: “They are so apt to be dull.” In a profile in the London Echo in 1905, the reporter noted that Spooner “has been singularly unsuccessful in making any decided impression upon his own college.” But his most outstanding characteristic was his facility for turning phrases on their heads. Among the more famous utterances invariably attributed to him are “Which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?” and, to a delinquent undergraduate: “You have hissed my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. You will leave Oxford on the next town drain.” At an optician’s he is said to have asked, “Have you a signifying glass?” and when told they did not, replied, “Oh, well, it doesn’t magnify.” But as his biographer William Hayter notes, Spooner became so well-known for these transpositions that it is sometimes impossible to know which he really said and which were devised in his name. He is known to have said “in a dark glassly” and to have announced at a wedding ceremony that a couple were now “loifully jawned,” but it is altogether possible that he actually said very few of the spoonerisms attributed to him and that the genuine utterances weren’t nearly as comical as those he was credited with, like the almost certainly apocryphal “Please sew me to another sheet. Someone is occupewing my pie.”

What is certain is that Spooner suffered from a kind of metaphasis of thought, if not always of word. These are generally well attributed. Outside the New College chapel he rebuked a student by saying: “I thought you read the lesson badly today.”

“But, Sir, I didn’t read the lesson,” protested the student.

“Ah,” said Spooner, “I thought you didn’t,” and walked on.

On another occasion he approached a fellow don and said, “Do come to dinner tonight to meet our new Fellow, Casson.”

The man answered, “But, Warden, I am Casson.”

To which Spooner replied, “Never mind, come all the same.”

Another colleague once received a note from Spooner asking him to come to his office the next morning on a matter of urgency. At the bottom there was a P.S. saying that the matter had now been resolved and the colleague needn’t bother coming after all.

Spooner well knew his reputation for bungling speech and hated it. Once when a group of drunken students called at his window for him to make a speech, he answered testily, “You don’t want to hear me make a speech. You just hope I’ll say one of those . . . ​things.”

In addition to mangling words in amusing ways, something else we can do in English that they cannot always do in other languages is construct intentionally ambiguous sentences that can be taken in either of two ways, as in the famous, if no doubt apocryphal, notice in a restaurant saying: “Customers who think our waiters are rude should see the manager.” There is a technical term for this (isn’t there always?). It’s called amphibology. An admirable example of this neglected art was Benjamin Disraeli’s airy note to an aspiring author: “Thank you so much for the book. I shall lose no time in reading it.” Samuel Johnson didn’t quite utter an amphibology, but he neared it in spirit, when he wrote to another would-be author, “Your work is both good and original. Unfortunately, the parts that are good aren’t original, and the parts that are original aren’t good.”

Occasionally people grow so carried away with the possibilities of wordplay that they weave it into their everyday language. The most famous example of this in America is boontling, a made-up language once spoken widely in and around Boonville, California. According to one story on how it began (and there are several to choose from) two sets of brothers, the Duffs and the Burgers, were sitting around the Anytime Saloon in Boonville one day in 1892 when they decided for reasons of amusement to devise a private language based partly on their common Scottish-Irish heritage, partly on words from the Pomo Indians living nearby, but mostly on their own gift for coming up with colorful secret words. The idea was that no one would be able to understand what they were talking about, but as far as that went the plan was a failure because soon pretty well everyone in town was talking Boontling, or harpin’ boont as they put it locally, and for at least forty years it became the common linguistic currency in the isolated town a hundred miles north of San Francisco. It became so much a part of the local culture that some people sometimes found it took them a minute or two to readjust to the English-speaking world when they ventured out of their valley. With time, the language grew to take in about 1,200 words, a good many of them salacious, as you might expect with a private language.

Many expressions were taken from local characters. Coffee was called zeese after the initials of a camp cook named Zachariah Clifton who made coffee you could stand a spoon up in. A hardworking German named Otto inspired the term otting for diligent work. A goatee became a billy ryan. A kerosene lantern was a floyd hutsell. Pie was called charlie brown because a local of that name always ate his pie before he ate the rest of his meal. A prostitute was a madge. A doctor was a shoveltooth on account of the protruding teeth of an early GP. Other words were based on contractions—forbs for four bits, toobs for two bits, hairk for a haircut, smalch for small change. Others contained literary or biblical allusions. Thus an illegitimate child was a bulrusher. Still others were metaphorical. A heavy rain was a trashlifter and a really heavy rain was a loglifter. But many of the most memorable terms were onomatopoeic, notably one of the terms for sexual intercourse, ricky chow, said to be the noise bedsprings make when pressed into urgent service. A great many of the words had sexual provenance, such as burlapping, a euphemism for the sexual act, based on a local anecdote involving a young couple found passing an hour in that time-honored fashion on a stack of old gunny sacks at the back of the general store.

Although some people can still speak Boontling, it is not as widely used as it once was. In much better shape is cockney rhyming slang, as spoken in the East End of London. Rhyming slang isn’t a separate language, but simply a liberal peppering of mysterious and often venerable slang words.

Cockneys are among the most artful users of English in the world. A true cockney (the word comes from Middle English cokeney, “cock’s egg,” slang for a townsperson) is said to have been born within the sound of Bow Bells—these being the famous (and famously noisy) bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church on Cheapside in the City of London. However, for a generation or so no one has been born within their sound for the elemental reason that they were destroyed by German bombs in World War II. In any case, the rise of the City of London as the capital’s financial district meant that cockneys had long since been dispersed to more outlying districts of the East End where the bells of Bow rang out exceedingly faintly, if at all.

The East End of London has always been a melting pot, and they’ve taken terms from every wave of invaders, from French Huguenot weavers in the sixteenth century to Bangladeshis of today. Many others have come from their own eye-opening experiences overseas during the period of empire and two world wars. Shufti, for “have a look at,” and buckshee, for “something that is free,” both come from India. “Let’s have a parlyvoo” (meaning “a chat”) comes obviously from the French parlez-vous. Less obvious is the East End expression san fairy ann, meaning “don’t mention it, no problem,” which is a corruption of the French “ça ne fait rien.” The cockneys have also devised hundreds of terms of their own. “Hang about” means “wait a minute.” “Leave it out” means “stop, don’t keep on at me.” “Straight up” means “honestly, that’s the truth.” Someone who is misbehaving is “out of order” or “taking liberties.”

But without a doubt their most singular contribution to English has been rhyming slang. No one knows when cockney rhyming slang began, but it has certainly been popular since the mid-nineteenth century. As with general slang, some of the terms exist only for a short while before dying out, while others live on for scores of years, sometimes moving out into the wider world where their low origins and true meanings are often mercifully unappreciated.

The two most often cited examples of rhyming slang are apples and pears = stairs and trouble and strife = wife. In point of fact, you could live a lifetime on the Mile End Road and not once hear those terms. But there are scores of others that are used daily, such as “use yer loaf” (short for loaf of bread = head), “have a butcher’s” (short for butcher’s hook = look), or “how you doin’, my old china?” (short for china plate = mate). A complicating factor is that the word that rhymes is almost always dropped, and thus the etymology is obscure. Titfer means “hat”; originally it was tit-for-tat = hat. Tom means “jewelry.” It’s short for tom-foolery = jewelry. There’s a technical term for this process as well: hemiteleia.

A further complication is that cockney pronunciation is often considerably at variance with conventional British pronunciation, as evidenced by rabbit (to chatter mindlessly) coming from rabbit and pork = talk. In the East End both pork and talk rhyme (more or less) with soak. (Something of the flavor of cockney pronunciation is found in the old supposed cockney spelling of the London district of Ealing: “E for ’eaven, A for what ’orses eat, L for where you’re going, I for me, N for what lays eggs, and G for God’s sake keep yer ears open.”)

Sometimes these words spawn further rhymes. Bottle, for instance, has long meant “ass” (from bottle and glass = ass). But at some point that in turn spawned Aristotle, often shortened to Aris’ (as in “Oo, I just fell on my Aris’ ”) and that in turn spawned plaster (from plaster of Paris). So you have this convoluted genealogy: plaster = plaster of Paris = Aris = Aristotle = bottle = bottle and glass = ass. (I have Americanized the spelling; the last word is actually arse, pronounced “ahss” to rhyme with “glahss.”)

Several cockney rhyming slang terms have taken residence in America. In nineteenth-century London, dukes meant “hands” (from Duke of Yorks = forks = hand), but in America it came to mean “fist,” and lives on in the expression “put up your dukes.” Bread as a slang synonym for money comes from bread and honey. To chew the fat comes from have a chat and brass tacks comes from facts. And if you’ve ever wondered why a Bronx cheer is called a raspberry, you may wish to bear in mind that a popular dessert in Britain is called a raspberry tart.