I need to warn you about me and words. I love them. I love the sound of them, the feel of them rolling around on my tongue. I love the games you can play with them, the puns, the rhymes (especially two and three syllable ones), the alliteration.
I came by it honestly. I was the fourth child of a man who worked full-time in Michigan but saw no reason why that should keep him from running a business in New Jersey as well. We spent a LOT of time on the road, and the way our parents kept four kids from killing each other was to keep us busy with word games.
We played the alphabet game more times than I can count. To this day, I cherish a fondness for Quaker State Motor Oil, because if you found one of their billboards at the critical moment, you got Q,R,S,T, and U at one go. (We were NOT in sympathy with Lady Bird Johnson's plan to take down the billboards to beautify the highways.)
We played license plate games; you know, whatever the string of letters in a
license plate, think of a word with those letters in that order, like:
Of course this was easy to do, thanks to the fact that in its formative years, English was in the hands of people who couldn't spell.
In the seventies, when we first started hearing about muslim terrorists, my grownup mind was appropriately horrified. My interior 8-year old, however, was saying, "JHD....jihad! What a neat word!"
Our weekly migrations were before the interstate highways came along..
We had two-lane traffic, with Burma Shave signs facing each lane. For those
of you born too late to know what I'm talking about, these were brief verses
spread over four or five signs, ending with the advertising pitch, as in
The child on the right was assigned to read aloud the forward Burma Shave signs. But the older child on the left had the awesome responsibility of reading the backward Burma Shave signs, sticking them into short-term memory, reconstructing them, and reciting them in the correct order.
My brother would read to us from Pogo, whose remarkable renderings of English included the immortal "We have met the enemy and he is us." Thanks to Pogo, I truly thought that Christmas carol went "Deck the halls with Boston Charlie, Walla walla wash and Kalamazoo." Seemed reasonable enough to me.
My sister would sing us the songs of Tom Lehrer, which I committed to
memory, and which clearly warped my world view, like:
We read Dr. Seuss and the Oz books. One of the greatest pleasures in raising a son was reading these aloud to him; I had forgotten how funny and filled with wordplay the Oz books were, like the long snake made out of alphabet blocks which was, of course, the ABC serpent.
I love intelligent puns, intended or otherwise. The goofs made by type-
setters never fail to amuse me, like:
I love writers who use words well, especially the funny ones. Some of the people I love most are people I have never met, but I know their minds through their columns or books: Dave Barry, Douglas Adams, John Ciardi, Dorothy Parker, Molly Ivins, Nicholas Negroponte, and all the people who enter the New York Magazine competition every week.
I won't ever be in their class, but at least you will know I'm aiming high, even if I never quite get there.
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