Word play

Word play or wordplay is a literary technique in which the words that are used become the main subject of the work. Puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, and telling character names are common examples of word play.

Word play is quite common in oral cultures as a method of reinforcing meaning.

Examples of visual orthographic and sound-based word play abound in both alphabetically and non-alphabetically written literature (e.g. Chinese).

Techniques
Puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, and telling character names – such as The Importance of Being Earnest (Earnest being both a name and an adjective) – are common examples of word play.

Interpreting idioms literally, contradictions, and redundancies are often used in word play, as in Tom Swifties:
 * "Hurry up and get to the back of the ship," Tom said sternly.

Linguistic fossils and set phrases are common fodder for word play, as in Wellerisms:
 * "We'll have to rehearse that," said the undertaker as the coffin fell out of the car.

Another use of fossils is in using antonyms of unpaired words – “I was well-coiffed and sheveled,” (from “disheveled”).

Examples
Most writers engage in word play to some extent, but certain writers are particularly committed to, or adept at, word play as a major feature of their work. Shakespeare's "quibbles" have made him a noted punster. Similarly, P.G. Wodehouse was hailed by The Times as a "comic genius recognized in his lifetime as a classic and an old master of farce" for his own ingenious wordplay. James Joyce, author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is another noted word-player. For example, Joyce's phrase "they were yung and easily freudened" clearly implies the more conventional "they were young and easily frightened", however the former also makes an apt pun on the names of two famous psychoanalysts, Jung and Freud.

Other writers and entertainers closely identified with word play include:


 * Lewis Carroll, in his Alice books, among other works
 * A. A. Milne's poem In the dark in Now We Are Six has been noted for its emulation of crib talk, a form of monologue word play used by infants to practice phonology, syntax and conversation skills
 * Forrest J Ackerman, magazine editor, coined "sci-fi"
 * The Apocryphal book of Susanna features elements of word play in the original Greek
 * Kool Keith
 * Aesop Rock
 * Beck
 * Seth MacFarlane
 * Elvis Costello
 * Piers Anthony in his Xanth novels
 * G. K. Chesterton
 * Groucho Marx
 * George Carlin
 * Steven Wright
 * Andy Zaltzman
 * Homer in his famous works The Iliad and The Odyssey
 * Isaac Brock (musician) vocalist/lyricist of Modest Mouse
 * Brian P. Cleary in his "Rhyme and PUNishment: Adventures in Wordplay"
 * Emo Philips, stand-up comedian, revered for his paraprosdokians and garden-path jokes
 * Willard R. Espy collected various anthologies of word play
 * Jasper Fforde
 * Above
 * Jack Kerouac (in On the Road and arguably more so in Visions of Cody)
 * John Lennon in (In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works) ("The Nasties Are Booming Us!")
 * Max Collins, lead vocalist and lyricist of Eve 6
 * Alan Moore
 * Dave Mustaine
 * Vladimir Nabokov
 * Flann O'Brien
 * Van Dyke Parks
 * Thomas Pynchon
 * George Bernard Shaw
 * Jason Mraz
 * Marilyn Manson
 * Lupe Fiasco
 * Lil Wayne
 * Till Lindemann
 * Jay-Z

Related phenomena
Word play can enter common usage as neologisms.

Word play is closely related to word games, that is, games in which the point is manipulating words. See also language game for a linguist's variation.