For many years, word games and wordplay have been an important part of my life. For me, the fulfillment of any real responsibilities depends very much on the day of the week: Mondays through Thursdays, in general, I am available for meals, doctor’s appointments, bathing, and other mundanities. You see, on these days, the New York Times crossword puzzle is reasonably solvable - for me, anyway. But Fridays through Sundays? No, on those days, I must wrestle time away, steal the minutes and hours here and there from the people - family members, students eagerly waiting for their essays to be graded, friends wondering what they’ve done to offend me - who, no doubt, would say I should be doing something more constructive than scribbling letters into little boxes.
And this is to say nothing of the time I expend playing Spelling Bee, Wordle, the Word Jumble, and the cryptogram.
I am a very good Scrabble player, too. Although not at the level of Grand Master, I can usually beat most people I know (the exceptions will not be named here, damn them). However, my true obsession is with solitary games in which it is just me and the clues in front of me. Still, now that I think of it, the player is, in a sense, engaging with the delightful minds of puzzle editors such as Will Shortz and, years back, the brilliant Eugene Maleska.
My broader interests also include puns - a far more spontaneous art form, a dash of impromptu wit. I have often used puns in my English classes when teaching vocabulary, although I am not sure that it actually enhances their learning. I think the best one I ever came up with, on the spot, concerned the word “turnkey.” My example for its usage in a sentence was…
For Thanksgiving dinner, the rebellious prisoners had stuffing, cranberry sauce, and
roasted turnkey.
Of course, a pun such as that one must always be immediately followed by a sincere apology.
In teaching poetic forms, when seeking a diversion from sonnets, villanelles, and odes, I sometimes offer my students limericks. For some reason - perhaps because of its overall ridiculousness - a good limerick practically guarantees a laugh. At one time, I could actually improvise limericks using my students’ names. Example:
I once had a student named Hugh,
a very bright kid, in my view.
I railed when I heard
he’d been labeled a nerd,
but he said, “Sir, no worries. It’s true.”
Obviously, that’s just good clean fun, but in younger times, during an especially odd phase, I took to memorizing dirty limericks. Believe me when I say that dirty limericks can be very dirty, gutter dirty, triple-x-rated dirty, full-dumpster-rotting-in-the-midday-sun-dirty. Just think of all the filthiest swear words in English that you know, and imagine the possibilities. I once knew some of the dirtiest ones, far too dirty to print here (but if you send me a private email request, I’ll be happy to share one with you). In fact, I was once kicked out of a faculty Christmas party for reciting some of them. What follows is the tamest one that I can recall. It is not particularly dirty, but it makes for a good opener.
A jolly old sailor named Bates
could do the fandango on skates.
He fell on his cutlass,
which rendered him nutless
and practically useless on dates.
Now, all of this presents a problem for anyone who regards himself or herself as a writer: an obsession with words (“word flu” I like to call it) can creep like kudzu into one’s attempts at serious work. You begin to wonder how well the reader might be paying attention and what you might be able to get away with. Case in point:
All that summer, Contessa spent the heated hours hoeing among the rows of pole beans on her uncle’s farm outside Modesto. By August, all the villagers agreed that she was the best hoer on the farm.
Nonetheless, I have tried in vain to concoct a scheme by which a competent writer who is not an international bestseller might actually be able to earn a living without having to go to work as a teacher or a copy editor or as a writer of manuals for the assembly of vacuum cleaners. For instance, I thought, the publishers of those trashy, pseudo-literary novels might wish to spruce things up a bit by including carefully crafted, descriptive metaphors in their books. “That’s it!” I exclaimed. “I’ll come up with a few random, meaty passages and try to sell them on the open market!”
Here are some of the results:
His voice was a swirling leaf, tossed briefly upon the wind but dying, finally, in the
silent muck of the turd-colored pathway.
And…
From somewhere deep beneath Elizabeth’s crinoline skirt, a fart puttered up and
insinuated itself upon the air, rather like a broken tractor rolling to a stop in a wet field.
She glanced up coyly and smiled at the gentleman seated across from her in the
train compartment.
Here’s one I’m particularly proud of:
Simon gazed down from the tall bridge’s railing and contemplated the river’s
undulating foam far below. ‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘only three seconds of terror, and then…
and then…’ He knew that he must go through with it. The dull grey light over New York
had broken in upon the sickbed of his memory, all his devil-may-care-years and his
willful refusal to separate the paper, the plastics, and the glass bottles, throwing them all
wantonly into the same bin. He could no longer stand himself, and he felt his foot
edging outward into the thin air…
This one was actually under consideration by a small publisher of romance novels, briefly:
Henry thundered into the bedroom with the Visa bill in his thick hand. He reminded
Joan of a bull moose in the spring, his horns shorn of their velvet, uncertain whether he
is driven mad by anger or desire. She turned softly on the settee, letting the sequined
straps of her teddy slip even further, further, across her slender collarbones and scented
shoulders, until the angry blood in Henry’s eyes began to ebb, and then, as always,
collapsing into her arms, he became the fawn… Yes, that’s it, a fawn, all brown and soft
and furry and fawn-eyed as she stroked him…
Although none of these has quite hit the mark yet, I haven’t given up on the idea. On the other hand, if nothing ever comes of it, an adage will be born: No matter how badly you try to do a thing, there is always someone who can do it a little worse. It reminds me of a remark made once by Groucho Marx, who was a great punster. One of the directors for the Marx Brothers’ films at MGM during their heyday in the 1930s was a fellow named Sam Wood. The story goes that Groucho, at a cast party, overheard Wood complaining about the comedian’s lack of training as an actor. Not knowing that Marx was standing behind him, Wood said,
“What do I think of Groucho’s acting? Well, you know, you can’t make an actor out of clay.”
Groucho leaned his head into the conversation and quipped, “That’s true. And you can’t make a director out of Wood.”