This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Wordplay is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
 |
This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (November 2007) |
 |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (October 2008) |
Word play is a literary technique in which the nature of 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 namesclarify are common examples of word play.
Word play is quite common in oral cultures as a method of reinforcing meaning.
Strictly visual orthographic word play is much less predominant than sound-based word play in alphabetically written literature.citation neededclarify This may be due to the fundamental orality of written communication in those literature, as compared with word play in ideographically written literature such as the Chinese.
Most writers engage in word play to some extent, but certain writers are particularly adept or committed to word play at length. Shakespeare's "quibbles" have made him a noted punster. P.G. Wodehouse was also hailedwho? as a "comic genius recognized in his lifetime as a classic and an old master of farce" for his ingenious wordplay.citation needed 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 conveys the meaning "young and easily frightened", but it also makes puns on the names of two famous psychoanalysts, Jung and Freud.
Other writers closely identified with word play include:
- John Lennon ("In his own write" and "A spaniard in the works")
- Lewis Carroll in his Alice books
- Carrottop occasionally uses puns to work with his props
- Willard R. Espy, who collected several anthologies of word play
- Vladimir Nabokov
- George Bernard Shaw
- G. K. Chesterton
- Van Dyke Parks
- Thomas Pynchon
- Flann O'Brien
- Jasper Fforde
- Jack Kerouac (in On the Road and more so in Visions of Cody)
- Isaac Brock is known for his clever word play in Modest Mouse lyrics.
- The Apocryphal book of Susanna has elements of word play in its original Greek.
- Marilyn Manson
- Dave Mustaine
Plays 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. The Hungarian term for wordplay, occasionally used in the circle for its diaeres, is Szójáték.
See also
External links
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 6 November 2008, at 15:41.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Wordplay".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.