The Mother Tongue (36 page)

Unlike American crosswords, which are generally straightforward affairs, requiring you merely to fit a word to a definition, the British variety are infinitely more fiendish, demanding mastery of the whole armory of verbal possibilities—puns, anagrams, palindromes, lipograms, and whatever else springs to the deviser's devious mind. British crosswords require you to realize that
carthorse
is an anagram of
orchestra,
that
contaminated
can be made into
no admittance,
that
emigrants
can be transformed into
streaming, Cinerama
into
American, Old Testament
into
most talented,
and
World Cup team
into (a stroke of genius, this one)
talcum powder.
(How did anyone
ever
think of that?) To a British crossword enthusiast, the clue “An important city in Czechoslovakia” instantly suggests Oslo. Why? Look at
Czech
(
OSLO
)
vakia
again. “A seed you put in the garage” is
caraway,
while “HIJKLMNO” is
water
because it is H-to-O or H
₂
O. Some clues are cryptic in the extreme. The answer to “Sweetheart could take Non-Commissioned Officer to dance” is
flame.
Why? Well, a noncommissioned officer is an NCO. Another word for sweetheart is
flame.
If you add NCO to
flame
you get
flamenco,
a kind of dance. Get it? It is a wonder to me that anyone ever completes them. And yet many Britons take inordinate pride not just in completing them but in completing them quickly. A provost at Eton once boasted that he could do
The Times
crossword in the time it took his morning egg to boil, prompting one wag to suggest that the school may have been Eton but the egg almost certainly wasn't.

According to a Gallup poll, the crossword is the most popular sedentary recreation, occupying thirty million Americans for part of every day. The very first crossword, containing just thirty-two clues, appeared in the New York
World
on December 21, 1913. It had been thought up as a space filler by an expatriate Englishman named Arthur Wynne, who called it a word-cross. (Remember what I said about inventors never quite getting the name right?) It became a regular feature in the
World,
but nobody else picked it up until April 1924 when a fledgling publishing company called Simon and Schuster brought out a volume of crossword puzzles, priced at $1.35. It was an immediate hit and two other volumes were quickly produced. By the end of the first year the company had sold half a million copies, and crossword puzzles were a craze across America—so much so that for a time the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad installed dictionaries in each of its cars for the convenience of puzzle-solving travelers who had an acute need to know that Iliamna is the largest lake in Alaska or that oquassa is a kind of freshwater fish.

Despite this huge popularity, the most venerable papers on both sides of the Atlantic refused for years to acknowledge that the crossword was more than a passing fad.
The Times
of London held out until January 1930, when it finally produced its first crossword (devised by a Norfolk farmer who had never previously solved one, much less constructed one). To salve its conscience at succumbing to a frivolous game,
The Times
printed occasional crosswords in Latin. Its namesake in New York held out for another decade and did not produce its first crossword until 1942.

Only one other word game has ever challenged the crossword puzzle for popularity and respectability, and that's Scrabble. Scrabble was introduced by a games company called Selchow and Righter in 1953, though it had been invented, by one Alfred Butts, more than twenty years earlier in 1931. Butts clearly didn't have too much regard for which letters are used most often in English. With just ninety-eight tiles, he insisted on having at least two of each letter, which means that
q, j,
and
z
appear disproportionately often. As a result, success at Scrabble generally involves being able to come up with obscure words like
zax
(a hatchetlike tool) and
xi
(the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet). Butts intentionally depressed the number of
s
's to discourage the formation of plurals, though he compensated by increasing the number of
i
's to encourage the formation of suffixes and prefixes. The highest score, according to Alan Richter, a former British champion writing in
The Atlantic
in 1987, was 3,881 points. It included the word
psychoanalyzing,
which alone was worth 1,539 points.

Wordplay is as old as language itself, and about as various. As Tony Augarde notes in his scholarly and yet endlessly absorbing
Oxford Guide to Word Games,
many verbal pastimes go back to the furthest reaches of antiquity. Palindromes, sentences that read the same backwards as forwards, are at least 2,000 years old. The ancient Greeks often put “Nispon anomimata mi monan opsin” on fountains. It translates as “Wash the sin as well as the face.” The Romans admired them, too, as demonstrated by “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni” (“We enter the circle after dark and are consumed by fire”), which was said to describe the action of moths. The Romans also liked anagrams—scrambling the letters of a word or phrase to form new words or phrases—and turned “Quid est veritas?” (“What is truth?”) into “Est vir qui adest” (“It is this man here”).

Among the earliest instances of wordplay, Augarde cites a Greek anagram dating from the third century
B
.
C
. and, earlier still, a lipogram by the Greek Lasus from the fifth century
B
.
C
. in which the poet intentionally avoided using the letter
s.
So it is safe to say that wordplay is very old and effectively universal. Even Christ reputedly made a pun when He said: “Thou art Peter: upon this rock I shall build my Church.” It doesn't make a lot of sense from the wordplay point of view until you realize that in ancient Greek the word for Peter and for rock was the same.

Wordplay in English is as old as our literature. In the eighth century
A
.
D
., Cynewulf, one of the first English poets, wrote four otherwise serious religious poems into each of which he artfully wove acrostics of his own name, presumably for no other reason than that it amused him. Verbal japes of one type or another have been a feature of English literature ever since. Shakespeare so loved puns that he put 3,000 of them—that's right, 3,000—into his plays, even to the extent of inserting them in the most seemingly inappropriate places, as when in
King Henry IV, Part I,
the father of Hotspur learns of his son's tragic death and remarks that Hotspur is now Coldspur. The most endearing names in English literature, from Lewis Carroll to James Joyce, have almost always been associated with wordplay. Even Samuel Johnson, as we have seen, managed to insert a number of jokes into his great dictionary—an action that would be inconceivable in other languages.

The varieties of wordplay available in English are almost without number—puns, tongue-twisters, anagrams, riddles, cryptograms, palindromes, clerihews, rebuses, crossword puzzles, spelling bees, and so on ad infinitum. Their effect can be addictive. Lewis Carroll, an obsessive deviser and player of wordgames, once sat up all night trying to make an anagram of William Ewart Gladstone before settling on “Wild agitator, means well.” Some diligent scholar, whose identity appears now to be lost, set his attention on that famous Shakespearean nonce word in
Love's Labour's Lost, honorificabilitudinitatibus,
and concluded that it must contain an anagram proving that Shakespeare didn't write the plays, and came up with “Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi,” which translates as “These plays, born of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world.” Think of the hours of labor that
that
must have involved. According to the
Guinness Book of Records,
a man in the English county of Hereford & Worcester wrote a palindrome of 65,000 words in 1983. Whether or not it makes much sense—and I would almost bet my house that it doesn't—we can but admire the dedication that must have gone into it.

Possibly the most demanding form of wordplay in English—or indeed in any language—is the palindrome. The word was first used in English by Ben Jonson in 1629. A good palindrome is an exceedingly rare thing. Most of them require a generosity of spirit to say that they make much sense, as in “Mad Zeus, no live devil, lived evil on Suez dam” or “Stiff, O dairyman, in a myriad of fits” or “Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts,” all three of which deserve an A+ for length and a D– for sensibility. Or else they involve manipulations of spelling, as the short but notable “Yreka Bakery” or the rather more venerable “Lewd I did live, & evil did I dwel.” This last, according to Willard R. Espy in
The Game of Words,
was written by the English poet John Taylor and is the first recorded palindrome in English, though in fact it isn't really a palindrome since it only works if you use an ampersand instead of
and.

The reason there are so many bad palindromes, of course, is that they are so very difficult to construct. So good ones are all the more cherishable for their rarity. Probably the most famous palindrome is one of the best. It manages in just seven words to tell an entirely sensible story: “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!” That is simply inspired. Others that have the virtue of making at least some kind of sense:

Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron.

Was it Eliot's toilet I saw?

Too far, Edna, we wander afoot.

Madam, I'm Adam.

Sex at noon taxes.

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

Able was I ere I saw Elba.

Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus.

Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.

This last, I realize, does not even begin to pass the plausibility test, but so what? Anyone ingenious enough to work
oscillate, metallic,
and
sonatas
into one palindrome is exempt from all requirements bearing on sense. The Greeks and Romans also had a kind of palindrome in which it is the words rather than the letters that are read in reverse order—rather as if the English sentence “Jack loves Jill, not Jane” had its word order reversed to read “Jane, not Jill, loves Jack,” giving an entirely new sense. This kind of palindrome has never caught on in the English-speaking world, largely because English doesn't lend itself to it very well. I've been working on it most of the afternoon (I told you wordplay is addictive) and the best I can come up with is “Am I as stupid as you are?” which reads backwards as well as forwards but, alas, keeps the same sense in both directions.

Not far removed from the palindrome is the anagram, in which the letters of a word or name are jumbled to make a new, and ideally telling, phrase. Thus “Ronald Wilson Reagan” becomes “Insane Anglo Warlord”; “Spiro Agnew” becomes “Grow a Penis.” Again, one can but gasp at the ingenuity and dedication that have gone into some of them. What kind of mind is it that can notice that “two plus eleven” and “one plus twelve” not only give the same result but use the same letters? Other famous or notable anagrams:

Western Union = no wire unsent

circumstantial evidence = can ruin a selected victim

a stitch in time saves nine = this is meant as incentive

William Shakespeare = I am a weakish speller (or) I like Mr. W. H. as a pal, see? (or) We all make his praise

funeral = real fun

The Morse Code = Here come dots

Victoria, England's Queen = governs a nice quiet land

parishioners = I hire parsons

intoxicate = excitation

schoolmaster = the classroom

mother-in-law = woman Hitler

Another form of wordplay is the
rebus,
a kind of verbal riddle in which words and symbols are arranged in a way that gives a clue to the intended meaning. Can you, for example, guess the meaning of this address?

Wood

John

Mass

It is “John Underwood, Andover, Massachusetts.” Many books and articles on word games say that such an address was once put on an envelope and that the letter actually got there, which suggests either that the postal service was once a lot better or writers more gullible than they are now. These days the rebus is a largely forgotten form, except on American license plates, where owners sometimes feel compelled to tell you their name or what they do for a living (like the doctor who put SAY AH), pose a metaphysical question (Y ME) or a provocative one (RUNVS), or just offer a friendly farewell (ALLBCNU). My favorite was the license plate on a truck from a McDonald's Farm that just said EIEIO. If nothing else, these vanity plates tell us something about the spirit of the age. According to a 1984 report in the
Los Angeles Times,
^*
the most frequently requested plate in 1970 was PEACE. By 1984 that had been replaced by GO FOR IT.

The French, in accordance with their high regard for the cerebral, have long cultivated a love of wordplay. In the Middle Ages, they even had a post of Anagrammatist to the King. One of the great French wordplayers was the novelist Georges Perec, who before his early death in 1982 was a guiding force in the group called OuLiPo (for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), whose members delighted in setting themselves complex verbal challenges. Perec once wrote a novel without once using the letter
e
(such compositions are called
lipograms
) and also composed a 5,000-letter palindrome on the subject of, you guessed it, palindromes.