Jim Bernhard - Puns, Puzzles, and Word Play: Fun and Games for Language Lovers

Copyright 2010, 2014 by Jim Bernhard Designed by LeAnna Wetter Smith All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018. Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or .

Skyhorse and Skyhorse Publishing are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., a Delaware corporation. www.skyhorsepublishing.com 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file. ISBN: 978-1-62873-744-8 Printed in China Dialogue from A Night at the Opera , screenplay by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1935. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Excerpt from Gravitys Rainbow , by Thomas Pynchon, The Viking Press, 1973; Penguin Books editions, 1995, 2000. Lines from A Void by Georges Perec, translated from the French by Gilbert Adair, reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Copyright 1969 by ditions Denol, Translation copyright HarperCollins Publishers 1994. Washington Crossing the Delaware, by David Shulman and others, from The Enigma , June 1936, and December, 1980. Reprinted by permission of National Puzzlers League, publisher of The Enigma .

Dopamine, Epinephrine, Valentine and So many poems I have read, by Paul Bernhard. Used by permission of Paul Bernhard. Chacun Gille (11), from Mots dHeures: Gousses Rames by Luis dAntin Van Rooten, copyright 1967 by Courtlandt H. K. Van Rooten. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Groups (USA) Inc.

Excerpt from If I Cant Sell It, Ill Keep Sitting On It, by Andy Razaf and Alexander Hill, copyright 1935. Used by permission of Joe Davis Music, Ellen Davis Morris, 9150 Marlin Drive, Boerne, TX 78006. For Ginger CONTENTS PREFACE Easy writings curst hard reading. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Clios Protest The title of this book Puns, Puzzles, and Wordplay is not entirely fair to the hardworking words between its covers, striving mightily to entertain you. In fact, the words in this cast of characters do their jobs often under more constraints than their lazier cousins who work in serious prose. A word in a pun or a poem or a puzzle has no understudy; no convenient synonym stands by to replace the mot juste in a well-turned epigram; there are no do-overs for words that must be precise if they are to do their job properly.

Oh, occasionally youll find some words in this book that have slipped into careless behaviorthose in the malapropisms and spoonerisms, for example. And there are also a fewthe ones youll find in the limericks and double entendres, especiallywhose naughty conduct may be justly chastised by some readers. But by and large these puns and puzzles are the most disciplined you will ever come across. Their playfulness is of the same sort that inspires the split-second reactions of a crackerjack cast in a rip-roaring farce or that propels a slapstick comedian taking a pie in the face. The timing is everything, and there is no room for error. The word play in the title refers to the spirit that motivates these verbal performers: a propensity for mischief, surprise, and laughter.

Their playfulness is a freeing of the syntactical bonds that hold back other, more staid words and make them boring. The words in this book just want you to have fun. And creating fun is very hard work. This book is certainly not the first foray ever ventured into the quirky world of words, and I am sure it will not be the last. Having fun with words has an eternal fascination, and I am grateful to such pioneers in wordplay as Homer (not Simpsonthe Greek one), Aristophanes, the Apostle Matthew, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Sir John Davies, John Dryden, Dr. S. S.

Gilbert, Mark Twain, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Dr. William Archibald Spooner, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, Eugene Field, Ernest Vincent Wright, Georges Perec, T. S. H. H.

Auden, Ogden Nash, Roy Bongartz, David Shulman, Dmitri A. Borgmann, Howard Bergerson, Jeff Grant, Leigh Mercer, Gelett Burgess, Richard Armour, Morris Bishop, Luis dAntin van Rooten, Nol Coward, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Andy Razaf, Bertrand Russell, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, H. L. Mencken, W. C. Fields, George S.

Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Oscar Levant, Bennett Cerf, James Thurber, Louis Untermeyer, Ben Gross, Groucho Marx, Yogi Berra, David Crystal, William S. Baring-Gould, Gershon Legman, Arthur Wynne, Eugene T. Maleska, William Safire, Edwin Newman, Trude Michel Jaffe, Richard Maltby Jr., Stephen Sondheim, Elizabeth Kingsley, Will Shortz, Thomas H. Middleton, Emily Cox, Henry Rathvon, Bill Morgan, Alistair Ferguson Ritchie, Edward Powys Mathers, Derrick Somerset Macnutt, Adrian Bell, Tom Lehrer, Judith Viorst, Ken Parkin, William Poundstone, Reginald Bretnor, Thomas Pynchon, Willard R. Espy, Ross Eckler, Russell Baker, Sylvia Wright, John Mella, Jon Carroll, and many others whom I have shamefully overlooked. They know who they are.

Many of them are quoted or referred to in the text of this book, and all of them have amused, instructed, or inspired me. For definitions, etymologies, and historical facts, I have relied on Websters New International Dictionary of the English Language , second edition (1949); Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary , eleventh edition (2007); The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971); The Columbia Encyclopedia , sixth edition (2000); and the indispensable Wikipedia.com. All material quoted from other sources and not otherwise credited is believed either to be in the public domain or to constitute fair use. Others who provided, often unwittingly, fodder for these pages include my mother, Willye G. Bernhard, and my friends Stephen Baker, Paula Eisenstein Baker, John Russell Brown, James Brannon, Richard Carlson, Christopher Combest, Betty Connors, Carol Conway, Carl Cunningham, A. del Rosario, Frank Lloyd Dent, Terrence Doody, Betty Ewing, Bob Feingold, Ange Finn, Michael Freeman, Sandy Graf, Dorothy Hackney, Roy Hamlin, Neil (Sandy) Havens, Helen Morris Havens, D. J. J.

Hobdy, Ann Hitchcock Holmes, Charles Krohn, Charles E. Kuba, Ralph Liese, Anne Marsh, Thad N. Marsh, Patricia Cunningham Marsh, Donna Martin, Toby Mattox, Ava Jean Mears, K. Lype Odell, John E. Parish, Carter Rochelle, Kathryn Rodwell, Charles Rosekrans, Isadore (Izzy) Schmaltzoff, Steve Shepley, Megan Smith, Paul C. Thomas, Harrison Wagner, Ralph Wilton, Susie Works, Frank Young, and several others whose names, like so much else these days, escape me.

My agent, the indefatigable Julia Lord, has been my sine qua non . Her ready wit, vast knowledge, fierce tenacity, and unvarying cheerfulness have earned her a place of honor in these acknowledgments. Ann Treistman, senior editor at Skyhorse Publishing, has been a joy to work with, and her expertise has helped craft the finished volume in innumerable ways. On a more personal level, my wife, Virginia Bernhard, a brilliant historian and author, has been a keen-eared critic and adviser and, as always, my chief inspiration. My gratitude goes to our children, Catherine, Paul, and Anne, who more-or-less good-naturedly spent much of their childhood subjected to their fathers puns, poems, and puzzles, not to mention plenty of palaver and poppycock. In adulthood, all of them have contributed puns and word games to the seething cauldron from which this book erupted.