- by Owen Morton
I have always been fascinated with word play. Well, perhaps not always. I suspect that my fascination with word play did not pre-date my awareness of such things as words, for example. And I have very little recollection of being fascinated with word play when I first started reading things like Puddle Lane, not that Puddle Lane really offered much in the way of possible word play. But the fact remains that for a relatively long time, I have been fascinated with word play. Well, perhaps ‘fascinated’ is not quite true either. ‘Mildly interested’ would probably be more accurate. But it’s not really as catchy to say ‘I’ve been mildly interested in word play for some time’. It’s wishy-washy, or washy-wishy, as one might say, if one were playing with words.
Which brings us round quite nicely (well, actually, it doesn’t, I’ll admit) to the subject of this article: word play. There’s all sorts of things you can do to play with words: palindromes, acronyms, anagrams, spoonerisms, malapropisms, and all those stupid types of poems that teachers make you do when you’re in Year 5 and they can’t think of anything better to do with you. This latter category is large, but the example I’m thinking of in particular is that of haikus.
What the bloody hell is the point of teaching haikus? I won’t deny that some are very good, but since the only specification is that they must have three lines, of syllables 5-7-5, you’re not going to get much of value out of a bunch of 9-year-olds, are you? I remember a haiku I composed when I was at that age:
I found a little brook,
and followed it a long way
to a great big fence.
I mean, honestly, how rubbish is that? Besides the fact that the first line has six syllables, not five (suggesting that I was too dim-witted to grasp the simple concept of a haiku), what does it mean? Who cares about the brook I found? Who seriously gives a toss whether I followed it to a great big fence or a great big alligator who ate me? And compounding this is the fact that it is not true. I have never been in the habit of following brooks anywhere. So all this pointless exercise (thank you, Miss Moore) showed is that when I was nine, I had nothing better to write about than brooks and fences. You’d think I’d have done something like,
He-Man found out that
Skeletor had a plan, so
he hit him quite hard.
That’s more my sort of style when I was nine (and now, to tell the truth). I can only assume Miss Moore said something about writing a poem about nature, although the great big fence doesn’t fit in with this.
But enough psychoanalysis about what my crap little haiku from Year 5 means. Let’s move on to an entirely different area of word play. No one does malapropisms better than Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing (a damned amusing scene, if you ask me – “Who among you is the most desartless man to …?”, although that’s all I can remember, but see how ‘desartless’ is cunningly substituted for ‘deserving’? Guaranteed to raise a really big laugh), so we’ll pass over those and get straight to spoonerisms.
Named for the Reverend Spooner, who seems to have been really bad at talking properly, this is switching the first letters of the words in your sentence around. It’s a bit unfortunate when – like the old rev – you can’t help it and end up saying stuff like “you have hissed my mystery lessons”, but it’s well funny when you do it deliberately. “I lurk in the wibrary,” is one not-so-great example. “Hoses in the rospital,” is a slightly better one, though not by a very long way. “Mop up your toe bile here,” is quite good really, while “Green grass” misses the point entirely.
So you see there are pots of lossibilities, but sadly I can’t think of any more. (I only thought of “hoses in the rospital” by thinking of the Manics track of a slightly similar name.) Frigmund Seud, noted psychologist that he was, believed that people would make spoonerisms in times of stress or sexual excitement. He was probably right, but psychology is a subject with which we will never know for certain. Just like history. History is a bit of a mystery. Or should that be mystery is a bit of a history? That’s possibly something else that we will never know.
And so on to palindromes. It’s not very easy to think of any, and chances are if I did think of any and inserted them subtly in the text (like I did with my spoonerisms above, I bet you didn’t notice) you wouldn’t spot them. But anyway, a palindrome is something spelt the same forward as backward – such as ‘Hannah’, ‘deed’ and not ‘sausages’. I once read a very long palindrome on the internet. It was good. But I can’t say much more about them.
And lastly, anagrams. An anagram is when you rearrange the letters of a word to form other words. Examples of this might be ‘late’ to ‘tale’, ‘bin’ to ‘nib’ and ‘Skeletor’ to ‘Leek rots’. None of these are particularly clever anagrams. A better one is ‘Heath the Rat’s Silly Page’ to ‘Hate a shapely girl’s set hat’, although that still isn’t very good. But enough about anagrams.
I know I said up there that anagrams were the last thing we were going to discuss. That was because at that point I had forgotten that there was something else to move on to. Now that I have remembered, I can’t be bothered to change what it says up there. And that is because the final example of word play in this article is so fantastic that I simply couldn’t wait to get round to it.
I’m surprised I managed to forget them, actually, considering that the title of the article is in fact one. That’s right … acronyms. Acronyms is when you make a poem or something using the first letter of another word. That’s really really not clear, but it’s probably better to demonstrate:
Really nice people
Are coming out to see me
Tonight – I am pleased.
That is both a haiku (of my own composition) and an acronym of ‘rat’. See how ‘rat’ is spelt down the side? Dead clever. It’s quite useful when you’re trying to remember things (apparently), but it’s another example of a really pointless exercise for Year 5 children. I remember having to do one that spelt ‘newspaper’. I bet it was completely unrelated to the subject of newspapers. But I probably enjoyed doing it.
So now I’m going to attempt to combine pretty much all these forms of word play in one word. (I’m not going to try to include the haiku in this majestic achievement, largely because I don’t think one word haikus are possible.) So, without further ado, here is a word which is a palindrome, a spoonerism, a malapropism, an acronym and an anagram of itself.
Squazzle.
It may not be obvious at first glance that this word is in fact all of these things. But it is.