The Life of Language

I’ve seen a lot of people treat the concepts of puns and wordplay with contempt, and it’s an attitude that I disagree with but also find interesting. So much of humor boils down to some form of word play: Mishearings and misunderstandings, artful allusions, sly references and onomatopoeitic justice. To discard the technique as inherently silly and artless is to do a disservice to the power of language – but, at the same time, I get it. Who doesn’t wince at crammed-in references, clumsy sound-alikes, hackneyed that’s-what-she-saids? The problem, however, is not the technique, but the application of the technique.

The way I like to think of it is that wordplay is an ingredient: You use it to make jokes, but wordplay itself is not much of a joke. Treating a pun like it’s the entirety of a joke is the humor equivalent of eating a bag full of chocolate chips: Perhaps enjoyable in its own way, but far less than the possibilities of using it in tandem with other ingredients and techniques.

This sort of play isn’t just about jokes though. Words are fantastically flexible things: They change their shape over time, they squish and stretch to fit the space they occupy. To speak a language is to become part of that shaping process, to both interpret and to craft the meaning, to be marked and to mark. No word survives an utterance completely unscathed, and each speaking shapes new connotation and interpretation, sometimes literally inverting the meaning of a word.

It’s a fascinating process to watch, at times gradual and at times sudden. Jokes and absurd metaphors start to, Pinnochio-like, become Real Words: Raising yourself by your bootstraps becomes a national aspiration rather than an amusing absurdity; robots become automatons become toys become weapons; scary acronyms for everyday concepts come and go, each new one reinvented as each past loses its power. The living history of language passes in front of us every day, and all too often we’re helpless to describe the shift because the words to do so keep eluding us.

The reason why its a bad idea to look down on wordplay too much is because, in some sense, it’s hardly play at all. It is a way of understanding and adapting words, of creating meaning in the space between them and trying it for size. This is not just the realm of humor, but also of metaphor and rhetoric and propaganda, powerful areas where real change can be effected. Many of the adaptations created this way will be pointless gibberish, but many are revealing; of new ideas, of surprising interpretations, of humor and meaning and perspective. It is more useful to respect what a technique can accomplish than to despise its clumsiest practitioners.

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