{"id":130914,"date":"2018-11-15T11:00:50","date_gmt":"2018-11-15T16:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=130914"},"modified":"2018-11-15T10:05:00","modified_gmt":"2018-11-15T15:05:00","slug":"in-defense-of-puns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/11\/15\/in-defense-of-puns\/","title":{"rendered":"In Defense of Puns"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Once upon a time\u2014in 382 C.E.<\/small>, to be exact\u2014Eve bit into an apple.<\/p>\n

Seeing it was good, she offered the apple to Adam, and he also took a bite. Whereupon Adam and Eve\u2019s eyes were opened, and they realized they were naked. Ashamed at having broken God\u2019s sole commandment not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve hid themselves when He came walking in the garden.<\/p>\n

And the rest, of course, is history. God in His wrath decreed that henceforth man must earn his daily bread by working the earth and woman must suffer agony in childbirth. As a final punishment, He cast Eve and Adam forever out of Eden.<\/p>\n

Prior to the fourth century, however, no one knew exactly which forbidden fruit Eve and Adam ate. Genesis records only that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was off limits; it does not specify what edible flower that tree produced.<\/p>\n

Apples appeared in 382 because that\u2019s when Pope Damasus I asked Saint Jerome to translate the Old Latin Bible into the simpler Latin Vulgate, which became the definitive edition of the text for the next thousand years. In the Vulgate, the adjectival form of evil<\/em>,\u00a0malus<\/em>, is malum<\/em>, which also happens to be the word for \u201capple.\u201d The similarity between malum<\/em> (\u201cevil\u201d) and malum<\/em> (\u201capple\u201d) prompted Saint Jerome to pick that word to describe what Eve and Adam ate, thereby ushering sin into the world.<\/p>\n

The truth is, though, the apple is innocent, and this unjustly maligned fruit\u2019s association with original sin comes down to nothing more than a pun.<\/p>\n

Puns straddle that happy fault where sound and sense collide, where surface similarities of spelling or pronunciation meet above conflicting seams of meaning. By grafting the idea of evil onto the word for apple, Saint Jerome ensured that every time we recall Adam and Eve\u2019s fateful disobedience in the garden we are reminded of the fruit of a deciduous tree of the rose family.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From the beginning, punning has been considered the lowest form of wit, a painful fall from conversational grace. What other form of speech is so widely reviled that we must immediately apologize for using it? \u201cSorry, no pun intended.\u201d<\/p>\n

But puns do not deserve such a bitter appellation. Despite its bad reputation, punning is, in fact, among the highest displays of wit. Indeed, puns point to the essence of all true wit\u2014the ability to hold in the mind two different ideas about the same thing at the same time. And the pun\u2019s primacy is demonstrated by its strategic use in the oldest sacred stories, texts, and myths.<\/p>\n

The Bible is replete with puns, even without Saint Jerome\u2019s help. God fashioned Adam from adamah<\/em>, Biblical Hebrew for \u201cearth.\u201d Eve\u2019s ancient Hebrew name is Havvah, derived from ahavvah<\/em>, which means \u201clonging\u201d or \u201clove\u201d but is also related to the words for \u201ccraving,\u201d \u201cmischief,\u201d and \u201ccalamity.\u201d Punning was even present at the foundation of the Christian faith itself, when Jesus famously said he intended to build his church upon Peter, whose name in Aramaic and in Greek means \u201crock.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Egyptian mythology, the human race sprang from the sun god Ra\u2019s tears; though written differently, the words for \u201cpeople\u201d and \u201ctears\u201d had the same pronunciation (\u201cremtj\u201d) in ancient Egyptian. The opening verses of the Indian epic the Ramayana<\/em> condemn a hunter who fells a beautiful crane with an arrow, but the same words can also be construed as praising the Hindu god Vishnu for felling the demon Ravana. And the classic Chinese philosophical text Tao Te Ching<\/em> begins with a triple pun: \u201cThe way [tao<\/em>]\u00a0that can be talked about [tao<\/em>] is not the constant Way [Tao<\/em>].\u201d<\/p>\n

Punning folds a double knowledge into words. To make and understand a pun, you must grasp two things at once: the primary, apparently intended import of a word or phrase, and the secondary, usually subversive one.<\/p>\n

The frisson in the ship captain\u2019s reply to the first-class passenger who asks if he can decide for himself whether to help row the lifeboat\u2014\u201cOf course, sir, either oar\u201d\u2014lies in the friction between explicit instruction and implicit threat. The brilliance of the tagline of the Upstate New York town known for its ravines and waterfalls\u2014\u201cIthaca is gorges\u201d\u2014lies in the simultaneous statement of geologic fact and natural beauty.<\/p>\n

The best puns have more to do with philosophy than with being funny. Playing with words is playing with ideas, and a likeness between two different terms suggests a likeness between their referents, too. Puns are therefore not mere linguistic coincidences but evidence and expression of a hidden connection\u2014between mind and material, ideas and things, knowing and nomenclature.<\/p>\n

Puns are pins on the map tracing the path from word to world.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Not all puns need to reveal a concealed metaphysical truth. Some are simple homophonic homages, which must be said aloud to be fully appreciated, such as, \u201cWhen you\u2019ve seen one shopping center, you\u2019ve seen \u2019em all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some puns offhandedly master the art of allusion, as in the description of contentment as \u201cthe smother of invention.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some offer deviant definitions; e.g., \u201cearthquake (‘\u0259rth\u02cckw\u0101k), n. a topographical error.\u201d<\/p>\n

And some span more than one language, to wit: the characterization of an elegant frankfurter as a \u201chaute<\/em> dog,\u201d a form of wordplay known as macaronic (from the Latin macaronicus<\/em>, meaning \u201cjumble\u201d or \u201cmedley\u201d), of which puns about German sausage are generally considered the worst.<\/p>\n

Yet even cheesy puns like these show how language is equivocal, two faced, duplicitous. Many of the simplest and most common words sound the same but have equal and often opposite meanings.<\/p>\n

Fast<\/em> means \u201cto move quickly\u201d (she can run fast<\/em>) as well as \u201cto be immobile\u201d (she was stuck fast<\/em>). Both meanings of cleave<\/em> cohere: \u201cto split\u201d (the paddle cleaves<\/em> the water with every stroke) and \u201cto cling\u201d (we cleave<\/em> to hope even when all hope is gone). Off<\/em> conveys both activity and idleness: when the alarm went off<\/em>, I realized I had forgotten to turn it off<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What Alexander Pope said of puns\u2014they speak \u201ctwice as much by being split\u201d\u2014is true of language as a whole, too.<\/p>\n

In this respect, puns pun on human life, which is itself equivocal, two faced, duplicitous. Everything does double duty. Doors offer exits and entrances; tears come from comedy and tragedy.<\/p>\n

James Joyce had a painting of his father\u2019s hometown\u2014Cork, Ireland\u2014framed in cork and hung in his Paris apartment, a physical reminder of his notion of the world as a place \u201cwhere unexpected simultaneities are the rule \u2026 Words move into words, people into people, incidents into incidents like the ambiguities of a pun, or a dream,\u201d according to Richard Ellmann\u2019s biography of the author of Finnegans Wake<\/em>, a six-hundred-plus-page novel made up almost entirely of macaronic puns.<\/p>\n

Nor could Shakespeare himself resist a little quibble, as puns were known in his day. There are some 200 puns in Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost<\/em>, 175 in Romeo and Juliet<\/em>, 150 in each of the Henry IV plays, and upwards of 100 in Much Ado about Nothing<\/em> and All\u2019s Well That Ends Well<\/em>. The average number of puns in a Shakespeare play is 78.<\/p>\n

It was all a bit much for Samuel Johnson, who wrote of the Bard\u2019s relish for this form of wordplay, \u201cA quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what Johnson could not stomach about puns is the essence of their appeal as wit.<\/p>\n

In act 1, scene 4 of King Lear<\/em>, the Fool taunts Lear for being, well, a fool for dividing his kingdom between his two deceitful daughters while disowning his upright third daughter. He asks Lear for an egg, for which he offers to pay the sum of two crowns.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat two crowns shall they be?\u201d Lear asks.<\/p>\n

Then the puns come trippingly from the Fool\u2019s tongue.<\/p>\n

Having cut the egg and eaten the whites, the Fool answers that he would offer Lear both halves of the yellow yolk, an image of the sundered royal headgear. He then berates Lear for dividing his crown\u2014his kingdom\u2014and giving half to each of his conniving daughters. Finally, he says Lear was stupid to do what he did: \u201cThou hadst little wit in thy bald crown, \/ when thou gavest thy golden one away.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this short speech, the Fool spins four puns from a single word. First, he pivots from crown<\/em>, the coin, to\u00a0crown<\/em>, the monarch\u2019s headdress. Then he plays off the resemblance between a semicircle of cloven yolk and the broken arc of a golden crown, a visual pun. Then he moves from\u00a0crown<\/em>, a physical object, to\u00a0crown<\/em>, a metaphor for the realm over which a king rules. And he tops it all off by calling Lear a bonehead and numbskull, skipping from\u00a0crown<\/em>\u00a0as sovereign domain to\u00a0crown<\/em>\u00a0as empty patriarchal pate.<\/p>\n

The Fool is not altogether a fool, and the pun is not merely a prankish word game.<\/p>\n

In stooping to employ the lowly quibble, Shakespeare elevates buried or forgotten senses of words, showing how the names for things intertwine with the things themselves. When he turns aside from balder statement to pursue that golden apple, he makes surprising correlations and uncanny couplings that keep the reader toggling back and forth between meanings. The puns are both launch pads and landing strips for the Fool\u2019s daring leaps of thought.<\/p>\n

In poems, words rhyme; in puns, ideas rhyme. This is the ultimate test of wittiness: keeping your balance even when you\u2019re of two minds.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

During a stint on the circuit court in Bloomington, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln had occasion to serve with prosecuting attorney Ward Lamon, a man of imposing physical strength who enjoyed challenging colleagues to friendly bouts of wrestling between sessions. One day, while Lamon was wrestling an opponent near the courthouse, his exertions caused a profound rent in the seat of his pants. Being called at just that moment into court, Lamon was unable to redress the situation or effect repairs, so when he rose to address the jury his sartorial misfortune was readily apparent.<\/p>\n

The other members of the bar, who had full prospect of Lamon\u2019s predicament from their chairs at a long table immediately to the rear of the prosecuting attorney, drew up a subscription to raise funds for a new pair of trousers. They passed the paper down the line from lawyer to lawyer, each one signing his name and pledging some absurd amount to cover Lamon\u2019s embarrassment.<\/p>\n

When the paper came before Lincoln, he quietly examined it, picked up his pen, wrote his name and under it a note of regret about his inability to render any pecuniary aid: \u201cI can contribute nothing to the end in view.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lincoln loved puns. Strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue with the president, Secretary of State William H. Seward happened to note a sign bearing the name of one T.\u2009R. Strong. \u201cHa!\u201d Lincoln cried, \u201cT.\u2009R. Strong but coffee are stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Upon receiving a letter from a Catholic priest asking him to suspend the sentence of a man due to hang the next day, Lincoln observed, \u201cIf I don\u2019t suspend it tonight, the man will surely be suspended tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lincoln\u2019s wordplay offers admirable instruction in how wit actually works.<\/p>\n

Sigmund Freud shared Lincoln\u2019s fascination for punning, and in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious<\/em> he offers a pun from Heinrich Heine\u2019s \u201cThe Baths of Lucca\u201d as a model for the mechanics of wit. In the story, the humble Hamburg lottery agent Hirsch-Hyacinth meets the famous Baron Rothschild and later boasts of how well the fabulously wealthy banker treated him, \u201cjust as if I were his equal, quite famillionaire.\u201d<\/p>\n

The coining of the term famillionaire<\/em> is a vivid example of \u201cthe peculiar process of condensation and fusion\u201d Freud believed characterized puns in particular and wit in general. In condensing famillionaire<\/em> from familiar<\/em> and millionaire<\/em>, Heine fused two definitions into a new double meaning, a meaning all the more striking for having been distilled from such disparate sources. The combination makes two things seen together seem quite strange that are, when regarded apart, seen as quite commonplace.<\/p>\n

All puns, including Lincoln\u2019s, operate in this way. By bringing together two distinct senses of suspend<\/em>\u2014one legal and metaphorical, the other physical and literal\u2014in the same mental space, Lincoln blended realms of understanding and interpretation that in conventional thinking remain separate. Through deft juxtapositions like this, puns reveal previously unseen relations among things. This reordering of ordinary associations, this upsetting of the apple cart of expectations, affords the mind sudden alternative points of view on subjects and situations it thought it knew.<\/p>\n

The relationship between wit and knowledge is embedded in the word\u2019s etymology. Derived from the Sanskrit verb vid<\/em>, \u201cto perceive,\u201d wit<\/em> occurs in Latin as vid\u0113re<\/em> and in Greek as idein<\/em>, both of which mean \u201cto see\u201d; hence the word witness<\/em>.\u00a0Vid<\/em> is also the source for the German word for wit, Witz<\/em>. (The German title of Freud\u2019s book on the subject is Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewu\u00dften<\/em> or, literally, \u201cWit and Its Relationship to the Unconscious.\u201d) And vid<\/em> is the root of witan<\/em>, Old English for \u201cto know or understand,\u201d whence comes the word wisdom<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Terms such as outwit<\/em> and quick witted<\/em> hint at the link between wit and knowing, while dimwit<\/em>, nitwit<\/em>, witless<\/em>, and unwitting<\/em> hint at the link between wit and not knowing. We have our wits about us if we are street smart, savvy, or shrewd. We live by our wits when we devise impromptu solutions to sticky situations or evade seemingly inevitable consequences. We can be scared out of our wits and, sadly, we can also reach our wit\u2019s end.<\/p>\n

The power of wit to provide insight and information is precisely what Isaac Tuxton, a scholar otherwise lost to history, celebrated in the pages of the Irish Monthly<\/em> in 1877. \u201cDelighted surprise is the common immediate sensation following fresh knowledge of an elevated or curious kind,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWhenever resemblances or relations are established between ideas, knowledge of some kind is communicated. Wit establishes such relations. Knowledge shows us what things are, how they are or might be, how things may be done and ends gained. Wit does the same. Therefore wit is knowledge, and communicates knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Etymologically\u2014and psychologically\u2014wit and wisdom are the same thing.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Charles Lamb once remarked that, when the time came for him to leave this earth, his fondest wish would be to draw his last breath through a pipe and exhale it in a pun. And he was a prodigious punster. Once, when a friend, about to introduce the notoriously shy English essayist to a group of strangers, asked him, \u201cPromise, Lamb, not to be so sheepish,\u201d he replied, \u201cI wool.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lamb and his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge shared a passion for punning, not just as a fireside diversion but as a model for the witty workings of the imaginative mind. \u201cAll men who possess at once active fancy, imagination, and a philosophical spirit, are prone to punning,\u201d Coleridge declared. He planned a spirited defense of the widely impugned practice, to be called \u201cAn Apology for Paronomasia,\u201d the Greek word for \u201cpun,\u201d drawn from para<\/em> (\u201cbeside\u201d) and onomasia<\/em> (\u201cto name\u201d).<\/p>\n

Coleridge considered punning an essentially poetic act, exhibiting sensitivity to the subtlest, most distant relationships as well as an acrobatic exercise of intelligence, connecting things formerly believed to be unconnected. \u201cA ridiculous likeness leads to the detection of a true analogy\u201d is the way he explained it.<\/p>\n

The novelist and cultural critic Arthur Koestler picked up Coleridge\u2019s idea and used it as the basis for his theory of creativity.<\/p>\n

Koestler regarded the pun, which he described as \u201ctwo strings of thought tied together by an acoustic knot,\u201d as among the most powerful proofs of \u201cbisociation,\u201d the process of discovering similarity in the dissimilar that he suspected was the foundation for all creativity. A pun, or indeed any instance of wit, \u201ccompels us to perceive the situation in two self-consistent but incompatible frames of reference at the same time,\u201d Koestler argued. \u201cWhile this unusual condition lasts, the event is not, as is normally the case, associated with a single frame of reference, but bisociated with two.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Koestler, the ability to simultaneously view a situation through multiple frames of reference is the source of all creative breakthroughs\u2014in the sciences, the arts, and the humanities.<\/p>\n

Isaac Newton was bisociating when, as he sat in contemplative mood in his garden, he watched an apple fall to the ground and understood it as both the unremarkable fate of a piece of ripe fruit and a startling demonstration of the law of gravity. Paul C\u00e9zanne was bisociating when he depicted his astonishing apples both as naturalistic, meticulously arranged produce and as numinous, otherworldly objects that existed only in his pigments and brushstrokes. Saint Jerome was bisociating when he alighted on malum<\/em> as the perfect word to describe the actual fruit Adam and Eve ate as well as their bad taste in partaking of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the first place.<\/p>\n

There is no sharp boundary splitting the wit of the scientist, inventor, or improviser from that of the artist, the sage, or the jester. The creative experience moves seamlessly from the \u201cAha!\u201d of scientific discovery to the \u201cAh\u201d of aesthetic insight to the \u201cHaha\u201d of the pun and the punch line. \u201cComic discovery is paradox stated\u2014scientific discovery is paradox resolved,\u201d Koestler wrote.<\/p>\n

Bisociation is central to creative thought, Koestler believed, because \u201cthe conscious and unconscious processes underlying creativity are essentially combinatorial activities\u2014the bringing together of previously separate areas of knowledge and experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is precisely how wit was understood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the word was used to describe innovative thinking\u2014something more akin to intellect or consciousness than to glibness or flippancy, a state of mind rather than just a sense of humor.<\/p>\n

Lately, though, wit\u2019s been whittled down to a sliver of what it really is. Witty<\/em> has come to mean merely funny, and a wit<\/em> is just someone with a knack for snappy comebacks.<\/p>\n

True wit is richer, cannier, more riddling.<\/p>\n

Wit can be visual as well as verbal, physical as well as intellectual. There is the kinetic wit of physical comedians, the serendipitous wit of scientists, the crafty wit of inventors, the optical wit of artists, and the metaphysical wit of philosophers. Wit is the faculty of mind that integrates knowledge and experience, fuses divided worlds, and links the like with the unlike. The pun is at once the most profound and the most pedestrian example of wit at work.<\/p>\n

Coleridge never did complete his planned apology, but Lamb did write several essays on punning before he breathed his last, including one entitled \u201cThat the Worst Puns Are the Best,\u201d in which he vigorously defended paronomasia, arguing that \u201cthe pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let the pun be the starting gun for this renaissance of true wit.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

James Geary is the author of four previous books, including the <\/em>New York Times best seller <\/em>The World in a Phrase, and the deputy curator at Harvard University\u2019s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. A sought-after speaker and avid juggler, he lives near Boston.<\/em><\/p>\n

Reprinted from <\/em>Wit\u2019s End<\/a>,<\/em> by James Geary. Copyright \u00a9 2019 by James Geary. Used with permission of the publisher, W.\u2009W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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