Trapped in a library somewhere in the United States, our correspondent's only means of communication is...
My Word's Worth
Word Child
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:
RYH....rhythm
FHY....fishy
FZN....frozen
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
Around the curve
Lickety split
Beautiful car
Wasn't it?
Buy Burma Shave!
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:
"My heart will be quickenin'
With each drop of strychnine
We feed to a pigeon
(It just takes a smidgeon)
To poison a pigeon in the park.
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:
Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim
Chester Morrill, 62, Was Fed Secretary
and of course my favorite piece of inadvertent truth,
"Mrs. Adams was suddenly taken seriously in her home today."
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.
Please feel free to send any comments on this column to Wordsworth
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