WORD column:

by Scott Westerfeld

In a far solar system, a race of featherless bipeds live much as we do. They make bombs, write poetry, and speak an English that has developed almost exactly as our own. Indeed, this otherwise perfect example of parallel evolution is upset by only one difference; these aliens fiercely play a punning and drinking game unknown on our planet. Any visitor to this far but familiar place will sooner or later be invited to participate. It is with this traveller in mind that I here set out the basics of the rules, and offer advice and rudimentary analysis. Of course, in all but the company of children the beginner will certainly be bested, but careful attention to the principles below will be rewarded with at least a face-saving performance.

The game works as follows: Around a table sit the contestants, who are required to consume one percent of their body-weight in beer per hour. The turn begins with the eldest player present and passes clockwise around the table. Each player must in turn declaim a pun, but of a very particular species, called a Display.

The first player always begins with:

"If a lawyer is disbarred, then a cowboy is deranged."

The play then proceeds to the next player, each turn linked to the last by semantic couplet. Thus the next player might say:

"If a cowboy is deranged, then a model is deposed."

Then the next player would begin:

"If a model is deposed..."

And so on. A few more of the classics follow. Although familiar to everyone, these venerable examples are acceptable in friendly play, especially from the lips of an out-worlder:

An accountant is disfigured.

A barber is distressed.

A nun is uninhabited.

Each Display must follow on the last before a set interval of time expires. You, a traveller, will usually find yourself in low-level games, where as much as thirty seconds is allowed between puns. A player unable to think of a pun is ejected. A player is also ejected if his Display is found to be unacceptable by general consensus. So, what makes a Display acceptable?

As you can see, each Display is a pun that follows the basic form of the non-pun "a lawyer is disbarred," combining a negative transitive verb with a profession. The verb may begin with un-, dis-, de-, or even the Greek negcourse, there is a subtle connection: to organize is to arrange things coherently, and an organ is a coherent arrangement of cells.

This point brings to light one of the great pleasures in the game: that the relationship between the verb and the profession often contains both disjunction and a connection. Usually this is the result of two words that historically started as one, but have been slowly separated by linguistic drift. For example:

A weatherman is demystified.

Even though the mist that a weatherman might predict is hardly synonomous with the myst- in mystery, consider that both mysteries and mists enshroud the things they surround. Is this merely a coincidental homonym or an historical connection, obscured by ages of etymological drift and spelling reform?

The oldest meaning of the word mystery is a sacred rite that only the initiated may observe; events which are enshrouded, hidden, unknown. Thus myst is an archaic word for priest or accolyte. On the other side of the coin, mist in Elizabethan English is used quite literally to mean a state of mind in which things are doubtful or uncertain. Thus in The Confutacyon of Tyndale's answere (1532) Sir Thomas More writes:

Or more recently, in Gilbert Burnett's History of His Own Time (1715):

These examples fall pleasurably on the developmental borderline between metaphorical and literal use of the word. Especially delicious is More's "dissipate and discusse," which pairs the meteorological process (dissipation) and epistemological process (discussion) by which mists and mysteries are dissolved.

Add to these observations the fact that the weatherman is himself an initiate to the mysteries of meteorology, a science concerned with divining the weather, and you have a very rich pun indeed.

Another Display that prises out metaphorical/literal connections is:

A swordsmith is distempered.

The tempering that a swordsmith performs is the processes of combining and balancing metals to make a stronger substance, such as steel. Ill temper in a person is crankiness and a tendency to blow one’s top, and an animal with distemper has descended into unalloyed madness. The temper that people lose is a mental balance and strength, hardened by experience. So when William Cowper writes in The Task (1784):

He uses forge and anvil metaphorically, but temper is simultaneously both literal and metaphorical, sited at a linguistic intersection between mental and metalurgical strength.

Consider the etymological connections implied by these Displays:

A grave digger is decrypted.

(The cryptographer buries meaning with codes and cyphers.)

A cashier is distilled.

(The till is the place where the business of the day condenses into the pure essence of commerce: cash. )

A bride is devoured.

(Wedding and other vows are explicitely spoken aloud. Devouring is also an oral act.)

Of course, a good Display doesn't need to have deep linguistic signifigance. Take for example:

A runner is defeated.

Although I may be wrong, I have found no etymological connection between feet and -feat. On the other hand, a possible objection to this pun is that "A runner is defeated" lacks disjunction, given that running is a competitive sport. In general play, however, this is considered acceptable, as the sentence's meaningfulness masks its disjunction; the pleasure is in visualizing the (mis)spelling in your mind.

A Few Pointers