Word play
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.
All writers engage in word play to some extent, but certain writers are particularly adept or committed to word play.
Shakespeare was a noted punster.
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 comes from Shaw: "
gh as in
tough,
o as in
women,
ti as in
station".
*
Van Dyke Parks*
Thomas PynchonPlays 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.
An extreme form of playing with words is creating a
fictional language.
A taxonomy of word play together with record-holding words in each category isavailable here:
Taxonomy of Wordplay*
Acrosticdoublespeak*
Anagram*
Ananym*
Apronym aka "
aptronym" or
nominative determinism*
Chronogram*
Constrained writing*
Crab canon*
Figure of speech*
Holorime*
Kenning*
Letter bank*
Lipogram*
Mondegreen*
Oxymoron*
Pangram*
Palindrome*
Portmanteau*
Pun*
Rebus*
Spoonerism*
Transcription (linguistics)*
Verbing*
Wit*
Figures of SpeechSee Also
http://www.acrosticdoublespeak.com, a site defining a novel genre of Orwellian based satiric word play
