|
|
|
Feature: Playing while saying
Consider yourself to be in a complex maze where the only way out is to understand its system and structure. With intelligence coupled with a bit of luck you can just about manage to predict whether it is a corridor that comes after a passage, or a closed door, whether a certain area is safe or oozing with traps.
In reality the only labyrinth that you will find yourself wandering in is that of the rules of the language you speak! The spelling and grammar, are often hard to master, but once understood can turn the language into a kind of game where the speaker can be incredibly inventive while staying within some of its limits!
Many English writers have at times played with the language to enjoy amusing games of their own. Lewis Caroll the author of Alice in Wonderland would playfully write letters to his friend, arranging all the words in a backward order:
“For it made you that him been have must it see you so grandfather my was then alive was that Dodgeson Uncle only the”.
The message is actually:
“The only Uncle Dogdeson that was alive then was my grandfather so you see it must have been him that you made it for”.
Jonathan Swift the writer of Gulliver’s Travels wrote his share of phony Latin to his friend Richard Brinsley Sheriden:
Odioso ni mus rem. Moto ima os illud dama nam?
It is actually reverse English: O so I do in summer. O Tom, am I so dull, am I a mad man?
George Bernard Shaw who wrote comic plays of social importance reasoned that according to the English language laws of pronunciation, the word ‘fish’ can also be spelt as ‘ghoti’, if one put the gh from laugh, with the o from women, and the ti from attention together.
Another writer George Perc wrote a 200 page novel named The Void without using the letter ‘e’ even once. This technique is called a ‘lipogram’. An anagram on the other hand is a sentence that reads exactly the same when read backwards. What’s more. One often stumbles across anagrams that are startlingly meaningful such as: “Even in Eden, I win Eden in Eve”.
A sentence is homophonic when it’s supposed to sound like something meaningful, rather than read as something meaningful. James Joyce wrote the novel Finnegan’s Wake mixing languages and words to create a medley of meanings. For example, “they were yung and easily freudened” means “they were young and easily frightened” but there is also a reference to Sigmund Freud and his field, psychoanalysis, at the same time.
Some people have put together images and words to create meanings, to make the making of a message more cyptic and sometimes just plain fun. In the image on the left the writer plays on the similarity of words in their sounds but difference in meanings.
It takes a writer to play with words masterfully, but through a simple game anyone can change popular sentences. The results are startling. Take a sentence and for every noun substitute it with the seventh noun following it in the dictionary. For example Brutus’ speech at Caesar’s funeral in which his famous opening line is: “Friends, Romans, Country-men, lend me your ears”, becomes “Frightful, Rom-pers, Couplets, lend me your earnings!” Not the best way to address mourners at a funeral I’m afraid!
|
|
|
|
