Wordplay

Descartes believed that mon­keys could speak, but that they pre­ferred to remain silent in order not to be forced to work. The intel­lec­tual process of grant­ing real­ity to an inven­tion and then apply­ing to that inven­tion the rigid rules of real­ity is nowhere more splen­didly demon­strated than in our rela­tion­ship to lan­guage. Long ago in a far­away desert, a man of whom we know noth­ing decided that the words he had scratched onto clay were not con­ven­tional account­ing signs num­ber­ing legal decrees or heads of cat­tle, but the ter­ri­ble man­i­fes­ta­tions of a will­ful god, and that there­fore the very order of these words, the num­ber of let­ters they con­tained, and even their phys­i­cal appear­ance must have a sense and a mean­ing, since the utter­ance of a god can­not hold any­thing super­flu­ous or arbi­trary. The cab­bal­ists took this faith in the lit­er­ary act even fur­ther. Since (as The Book of Genesis recorded) God had said, “Let there be light” and there was light, they argued that the very word light pos­sessed cre­ative pow­ers, and that if they knew le mot juste and its true into­na­tion, they could become as cre­ative as their Creator. The his­tory of lit­er­a­ture is, in some sense, the his­tory of this hope. 

Wordplay enthu­si­asts are less inter­ested in imi­tat­ing the Almighty and less con­fi­dent in the mag­i­cal pow­ers of the Word, but equally con­cerned with dis­cov­er­ing the secret rules that gov­ern a sys­tem of signs and sym­bols. Like the ancient cab­bal­ists, they per­mu­tate, count, rearrange, divide and reassem­ble let­ters for the sheer delight of draw­ing order out of chaos. Behind the pas­sion of cross­word puz­zle solvers, pun­sters, ana­gram­ma­tists, palin­drome mak­ers, dic­tio­nary scour­ers, Scrabble play­ers and code break­ers lies a kind of mad faith in the ulti­mate ratio­nal­ity of language. 

I recently hap­pened upon a book by that word­smith extra­or­di­naire, Ross Eckler: Making the Alphabet Dance: Recreational Wordplay (St. Martin’s Press), an impres­sive cat­a­logue of the ways and means by which this ratio­nal­ity may be teased out. Though Eckler is con­cerned with con­tem­po­rary efforts, some of these word games are ancient. There are exam­ples of acros­tics among the Mesopotamians, ana­grams among the Hebrews, pan­grams among the Greeks, palin­dromes among the Romans. Puns, which reveal behind their at times doubt­ful humour the web-like coher­ence of the cos­mos, are uni­ver­sal. At least accord­ing to St. Jerome’s trans­la­tion of the Bible, the found­ing of the Catholic Church is based upon a pun made by Jesus when He said, point­ing to Peter (Petrus in Latin), “Upon this stone [also petrus] I will build my church.” 

Eckler’s book is delight­ful in its rich­ness and the word games he lists are won­der­fully inge­nious: texts that eschew one or sev­eral let­ters of the alpha­bet (such as Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition, bril­liantly trans­lated into English—A Void—by Gilbert Adair, which excludes in both lan­guages the let­ter e); texts that avoid all vow­els except one (“I’m liv­ing nigh grim civic blight; / I find its vic­tims, sick with fright”); tau­tonyms, or words made up of two iden­ti­cal parts (such as mur­mur), which in turn develop into the highly sophis­ti­cated “cha­rade sen­tence” (“Flamingo pale, scent­ing a latent shark / Flaming opales­cent in gala tents-hark!”); trans­posal words obtained by rear­rang­ing the let­ters of another word (carol to coral); three-way homonyms, the scourge of for­eign­ers learn­ing English (idol, idle and idyll), “undom­i­nated” words in which an alpha­betic sequence can be found con­tain­ing all the let­ters in that sequence, when no word exists with a longer sequence of those same let­ters (as in deft).

The fact that many of these clas­si­fi­ca­tions are also hugely enter­tain­ing should not lead any­one to ignore or ques­tion their seri­ous­ness. Poets, for instance, have long used them: from Lasus of Hermione, who in the sixth cen­tury B.C. excluded sigma from his “Ode to the Centaurs,” to Cervantes, who included in his pref­ace to Don Quixote a few “trun­cated” son­nets (in which not the final but the penul­ti­mate syl­la­ble of each line car­ries the rhyme), and from Gerard Manley Hopkins and his fond­ness for cha­rade sen­tences (“Resign them, sign them”), to the anony­mous bard who penned “Time wounds all heels.” Poetry, in fact, is proof of our innate con­fi­dence in the mean­ing­ful­ness of word­play. That we should trust rhyme to lend mean­ing or allit­er­a­tion to express a thought is not too far from the spirit of the Renaissance necro­mancers who believed that the secret name of Rome was Roma spelled backwards.* 

Martin Gardner, in his brief intro­duc­tion to Eckler’s book, notes that much of the new word­play “would not have been made with­out the help of com­put­ers” but adds that he does not want to “give the impres­sion that com­put­ers are required for mak­ing new dis­cov­er­ies.” Indeed. Though com­put­ers can tell us (for instance) that there are 3,276 ways in which three let­ters can be cho­sen from the alpha­bet with rep­e­ti­tion allowed, such mechan­i­cal meth­ods pro­vide, I believe, scant enter­tain­ment to either sea­soned lex­i­cophiles or invet­er­ate cab­bal­ists. At the dawn of the com­puter age, Arthur C. Clarke penned a warn­ing. In a short story called “The Nine Billion Names of God,” a Tibetan lamasery engages the ser­vices of Western com­puter experts to run through all pos­si­ble com­bi­na­tions of let­ters in order to come up with one that is the hid­den name of God — a task, these Tibetans believe, that lends rea­son to the exis­tence of the uni­verse. The experts install the com­puter and over sev­eral months it spews out count­less jum­bles of names. At last the final com­bi­na­tion is pro­duced. As the experts pack up to leave, one of them casu­ally looks up at the sky. Overhead, with­out any fuss, the stars are going out. 

*What hope is there for Vancouver, which mag­i­cally reads Revuocnav — “Revue of Knaves” in the Evenko tongue—or Toronto, which reveals itself as Otnorot—“The Rot of Otno” in Esperanto? (Note: “Otno” is the name given to Premier Mike Harris in the Esperanto com­mu­nity.)