I love words. This should come as no surprise, given that I’m a writer. Ever since the group’s inception, I’ve been a member of PUNY (Punsters United Nearly Yearly), an online wordplay group. I love to play with words as much as I love to write and edit them. (And yes, I’m one of those fortunate few who really love their work.)At the moment, among the projects I’m juggling is a punny riddle book for kids that’s an outgrowth of the riddle games we play online in PUNY.
Other kinds of wordplay occur to me spontaneously that have no purpose at all, nor any likely outlet. They are not book fodder, nor are they destined to live on in print permanence, or even amid electrons. They are just the workings of an antic mind that loves words, wordplay, and such.
Sometimes I find myself making random notes like this one from the night before last. It simply reads “stored/sorted,” but it tells me that by changing the position of just one letter in the first word, you come up with a perfectly valid different word. This may wind up being the basis of a game in PUNY one day, or even find some other outlet, but in all probability it will see no life outside of my bedside notepad.
The same is true of this observation, also to be found on the same notepad: “The letters H-A, when spoken, sound so much like the spoken letters A-J.” There is no rhyme nor reason for that thought to have popped into my head, and no practical use for it, either, but my brain loves wordplay and doesn’t shut down when I walk away from my computer at night.
Speaking of the sound of letters, I’ll digress here to briefly tell you an amusing story. When my daughter was little and first went off to day camp, she came home and announced they had learned a song that day. The song, with which you are likely familiar, although I had never heard it before that day, was “BINGO.” As my daughter rendered it, it came out thus: “There was a farmer had a dog and Bingo was his name, oh. Ee, I, eh, ee, oh. Ee, I, eh, ee, oh. Ee, I, eh, ee, oh. And Bingo was his name, oh.” As she proudly sang it over and over, the lightbulb went off, and I realized that what she was singing as “Ee, I, eh, ee, oh” must surely be properly, “B – I –N – G- O.” In mishearing the letters as nonsense syllables, she missed the whole point of the line…although, in all fairness, she was so young as to still not know how to read or spell.
But back to my enjoyment of wordplay. Sometimes it does have a practical result—like the time I was intrigued by playing with the plural of “octopus,” which of course is the irregular form, “octopi.” In my mind I added an “e” at the end to make it “octopie,” which would be a foodstuff. I was off and playing with words again. The concept grabbed me. Hmmm…. Octopie. Octopus pie. What about an octopus pie?
No, this didn’t lead to one of my culinary creations…but it did lead to a book. OCTOPUS PIE is the story, told in rhyme, of two kids who go fishing in hopes of catching a fat octopus to bake in a pie. “Fen” (pen name of James Farley) illustrated it, and eventually Roundtable published it. It’s cute, short, and funny, and when I read it aloud at a pre-school, after-school group, or daycamp, the kids love it.
And it all started with mindless, pointless wordplay.
Talk about a busman’s holiday! I not only engage in wordplay but actually write whole pieces for fun. I also write haiku (a Japanese form of poetry—in English) just for fun, but some of them eventually made their way into a book, too. (HAIKU FOR LOVERS is currently out of print.)
What does a writer do for fun? She writes…and engages in other forms of wordplay. I guess, as the old expression goes, I have ink flowing in my veins.
It’s a good life!