Playing with Words
Funny words have always been my friends: Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo; supercalifragilisticexpialidocious; corpulent porpoises; squat.
My family loved playing word games. Mom and Dad would give us kids booklets of word search games to keep us quiet in the car on long drives. Every day after supper my family played games, and Hangman was a staple.
Mom liked word games everyone could play. The game she taught us kids was Stinky Pinky. The rules were that you had to come up with two words that rhymed, and they had to be one adjective and one noun. Then you had to give a clue as to the meaning, and a clue as to how long the pairs were. So a single syllable would be a Stink Pink, two syllables would be a Stinky Pinky, and three syllables would be a Stinkety Pinkety.
Here are some examples:
a rosy noggin Stink Pink (red head);
a fuzzy fruit Stinky Pinky (hairy berry);
a left-handed preacher Stinkety Pinkety (sinister minister).
My dad was well-known as a terrible punster (meaning, of course, a good one). He used to make up puns, to our constant delight. He didn’t like anything better than telling a pun at dinner (captive audience) and making people groan. One of his old favorite puns (because he also coached the chess club) was:
Several friends attended a chess competition together, and at the end of the day they returned to their hotel, lingering in the lobby, reviewing their games and bragging about their best moves and their victories. After a while, the manager came out and asked them to go to their rooms. When they asked him why, he said, “I can’t stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.”
This playful background ensured I would love words all my life. After I left home, I discovered the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who played with words as no other poet before him. But his writing wasn’t funny at all, it was just rich and luminous. Here’s a verse from “The Sea and the Skylark”:
Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend.
Before I read his work, it never occurred to me that language could be playful while conveying serious thoughts. Yet behind the serious message, you can always hear the joy!
