A palindrome (from the Greek palindromos 
, “running back again”) is a word, a word row, a sentence, or a longer statement that communicates the same message when the letters of which it is composed are read in reverse order. Even if you’re a dud, kook, boob, or poop, palindromes should make you exult, Ah ha!, Oh, ho!, Hey, yeh!, Yo boy!, Yay!, Wow!, Tut-Tut!, Har-har!, Rah-rah!, Heh-heh!, Hoorah! Har! Ooh!, and Ahem! It’s time. Ha!
Prize palindromes exhibit subject-verb structure. Cobbling a subject-verb palindromic statement is harder to pull off than single-word or phrasal palindromes and, hence, more elegant when the result is successful. Moreover, subject-verb syntax inspires the reader to conjure up a clearer image of persons or things in action:
This matter of imagery is crucial to the greatness of a palindrome. Top-drawer palindromic statements invoke a picture of the world that is a bubble off plumb yet somehow of our world. One could warn one’s nurse that gypsies are nearby. Someone named Otis could sit on a potato pan, and shorn drunkards could seek to do us grave bodily harm.
Two of my favorite subject-verb palindromes are Elk City, Kansas, is a snaky tickle (and there really is an Elk City, Kansas) and Doc, note. I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod. But as delightfully loopy as the first specimen is and as astonishing in its length and coherence as the second three-sentence jawdropper is, they do not summon up vivid images to cavort in our mind’s eye.
Using the rubrics of elegance, subject-verb structure, and bizarre but vivid imagery, I submit that the greatest palindrome ever cobbled is: Go hang a salami. I’m a lasagna hog.
Now that you have read this small disquisition on the art and craft of the palindromes, I hope you have lost any aibohphobia, “fear of palindromes,” you may have experienced and are now suffused with ailihphilia, “a love of palindromes.”
(See ADAM, AGAMEMNON, CIVIC, KINNIKINNIK, NAPOLEON, SENSUOUSNESS, WONTON, ZOONOOZ.)
Pandemonium. In his epic poem Paradise Lost, John Milton invented Pandemonium—from the Greek pan 
, “all,” and daimon 
, “evil,” literally “a place for all the demons”—as the name of the home for Satan and his devilish friends. Because the devils were noisy, the meaning of pandemonium, now lowercased, has been broadened from “the capital of hell” to mean “uproar and tumult.”
Pandemonium exhibits the major vowels—a, e, i, o, and u—in almost alphabetical order. It also can be defined as “what happens when the pandas at the zoo go nuts.”
For many lovers of literature, places that exist only between the covers of books are as vivid as places that actually exist on gas station maps, and many of these literary locations dot the maps of our literature:
(See CATCH-22, CHARACTONYM, CHORTLE, DOGHOUSE, NERD, OZ, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.)
Pangram. One of the mightiest challenges for the intrepid logologist is to construct the perfect pangram—a sentence that employs every letter in the alphabet at least once. The most famous exhibit is The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog, but since that thirty-three-letter statement was created for typists, many shorter ones have bounded onto the stage:
And—glory be!—cast your eyes upon four twenty-six-letter Peter Pangrams:
The first two of these exhibits make perfect sense but contain two initialisms. The third sentence contains one initialism and an arcane word, pyx: a vessel used in the Catholic church. The last is a sentence devoid of initialisms, and it does have a meaning, roughly “An irked, buzzing fly pokes a Hebrew letter written by a valley Kurd.” But, to say the least, that pangram is not terribly accessible.
If you can come up with a twenty-six-letter pangram that makes easy sense and doesn’t resort to initials, names, and mutant words, wing it to me, and I’ll make you famous.
(See UNCOPYRIGHTABLE.)
Paradox. My son Howard and daughter Annie are professional poker players who live and move and have their beings in that windowless, clockless pleasure dome known as Las Vegas. It’s an easy life—earning thousands of dollars in a single night just sitting around playing card games. But it’s a hard-knock life, too, what with the long, sedentary hours; the addictive behavior and secondhand smoke that suffuse the poker rooms; and the times when Lady Luck goes out whoring and your pocketbook and ego get mugged.
How best to catch and crystallize this collide-o-scopic life my children lead, this life of gorgeous poker rooms and hearts of darkness, of Euclidean clarity and survival of the meanest? Bob “Silver Eagle” Thompson, once tournament director of the World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe casino, said it best: “Poker is a tough way to make an easy living.”
That’s a paradox, a statement that seems absurd or self-contradictory but that turns out to be true. The word paradox combines para, “against,” and doxos, “opinion, belief.” In its Greek form the word meant “not what you’d expect to be true.”
Paradox is a particularly powerful device to ensnare truth because it concisely tells us something that we did not know we knew. It engages our hearts and minds because, beyond its figurative employment, paradox has always been at the center of the human condition. “Man’s real life,” wrote Carl Jung, “consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. If it were not so, existence would come to an end.”
Paradox was a fact of life long before it became a literary and rhetorical device. Who among us has not experienced something ugly in everything beautiful, something true in everything false, something female in something male, or, as King Claudius says in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “mirth in funeral” and “dirge in marriage”? Who among us is not captured by and captured in Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Man”?:
Placed on the isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge on the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast.
In doubt his mind or body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
As I—glory, jest, and riddle—finish writing this entry, I suffer a little death. Something has ended, winked out, never to be begun, shaped, or completed again. But, at the same time, as I approach the end, I think of the poet John Donne, who, four centuries ago, chanted the paradoxology of our lives: “Death, thou shalt die.”
Now that I’m ending this small disquisition, I’m a bit immortal, too, because I know that you, in another place and another time, are passing your eyes over these words and sharing my thoughts and emotions long after I have struck the symbols on my keyboard, perhaps even after I have slipped this mortal coil.
(See CHIASMUS, HYSTERON PROTERON, IRONY, METAPHOR, METONYMY, OXYMORON, ZEUGMA.)
Partridge. Believe it or not, the name of this game bird soars up from the Greek perdesthai, “to break wind,” a humorous comparison to the whirring noise of the bird’s wings in flight.
In the seasonal song “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” have you ever wondered why the true love sends not only a partridge but an entire pear tree? That’s because in the early French version of the song the suitor proffered only a partridge, which in French is rendered as une pertriz. A 1718 English version combined the two—“a partridge, une pertriz,” which, slightly corrupted, came out sounding like “a partridge in a pear tree.” Through a process known as folk etymology, the partridge has remained proudly perched in a pear tree ever since.
(See BUFFALO, BUTTERFLY, CANARY, CLAM, CRESTFALLEN, DACHSHUND, DANDELION, HORSEFEATHERS, OSTRACIZE, PEDIGREE, TAD, TURKEY, VACCINATE, ZYZZYVA.)
Pastern. The part of a horse’s foot between the fetlock and the top of the hoof. In his influential Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson famously misdefined the word as “the knee of a horse.” When a woman asked Dr. J to explain why he had botched the definition, he replied, “Ignorance, madam. Pure ignorance.”
Logologically—in terms of letter play—pastern is the most charadeable of all words in the English language. That is, when you sextuplely cleave pastern at any point in the word, you will come up with two words.
As you look at the changing two halves, bear in mind that all letters are entries in dictionaries and hence qualify as words, that ern is a variant spelling for a long-winged species of sea eagle, that a paster is someone who pastes, and that an RN is a registered nurse:
p astern
pa stern
pas tern
past ern
paste RN
paster n
The word pasterns can be formed by working from left to right and adding a letter at a time to p:
p
pa
pas
past
paste
paster
pastern
pasterns
(See ALONE, MARSHALL, REACTIVATION, STARTLING.)
Pedigree. Even a birdbrain has little trouble figuring out how we derived the noun crane for a hoisting machine or the verb to crane to depict the act of stretching one’s neck to obtain a better view. But it takes an eagle eye to spot the crane hiding in pedigree.
Perhaps you are proud of your dog’s or cat’s or your own pedigree, but did you know that pedigree gets its pedigree from the French phrase “foot of the crane” (Latin pe, “foot” + de, “of” + grus, “crane”)? Why? Because if you trace a pedigree on a genealogical table, you find that the three-line figures of lineal descent resemble a crane’s foot.
(See BUFFALO, BUTTERFLY, CANARY, CLAM, CRESTFALLEN, DACHSHUND, DANDELION, HORSEFEATHERS, OSTRACIZE, PARTRIDGE, TAD, TURKEY, VACCINATE, ZYZZYVA.)
Philodendron. This plant can thank the Greek language for its name: philo- “loving” + dendron, “tree.” Because a philodendron is an evergreen plant that climbs trees, it is a “lover of trees.”
The nickelodeon got its name from a blending of nickel, the cost of admission, and melodeon, an old word for a music hall.
Incorrigible punster that I am (don’t incorrige me), I have noticed that these two words, and others like them, start with something that sounds like a first name and then comes an O.
So, have you heard about
(See BOLT, PUN.)
A picayune was originally a Spanish half real (pronounced “rayahl”) worth about six cents and circulated throughout the American South. It didn’t take long for prices to rise and for inflation to erode the already paltry value of the coin. Up grew the phrase “not worth a picayune,” referring to something of little value. Before long, to be picayune about a matter came to mean to be petty or picky.
The adjective picayune is a mint-condition example of how we metaphorically put our money where our mouth is and our mouth where the money is. To coin a phrase (or two), not only does money talk; we talk about money. That’s why elsewhere in this book, you’ll find small disquisitions about the likes of bottom dollar, top dollar, jackpot, pass the buck, and talent. That’s why if you throw in your two cents, I’ll give you a penny for your thoughts and you’ll be short-changed.
Hey, my own thoughts may not be worth a red cent or a plugged nickel, but I promise not to take any wooden nickels or nickel and dime you to death. I may be as phony as a three-dollar bill, but I look like a million dollars—all green and wrinkled.
What about the ubiquitous financial metaphor scot-free? The compound has nothing to do with Scotland or the Scottish people. Even before Shakespeare’s day, a scot was a municipal tax paid to a sheriff or bailiff. So for centuries those who got off scot-free managed to avoid paying their taxes. Their progeny still walk the earth.
You can bank on my expertise; it’s like money in the bank, and you can take it to the bank. No longer will you be penny wise and pound foolish and unable to make head or tail of expressions such as don’t take any wooden nickels. During the centennial celebration of America, in Philadelphia, commemorative tokens made of wood sold for five cents. Such coins were accepted as legal tender while the festivities were in progress. But once the show was over, their value disappeared. That’s why, beginning in the late nineteenth century, the advice Don’t take any wooden nickels became the popular equivalent of “Don’t be a sucker.”
(See METAPHOR.)
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis. This hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian word is the longest enshrined in Merriam Webster’s Third New International Dictionary and, since 1982, the longest in the Oxford English Dictionary. The word describes a miners’ disease caused by inhaling too much quartz or silicate dust. Among its forty-five letters and nineteen syllables occur nine o’s, surely the record for a letter most repeated within a single word; six c’s; and but one e.
Here’s a limerick about superultrahypermultimagnamega words:
It’s true that I have halitosis,
At least it’s not pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis.
Thus, rather than floccinaucinihilipilification,
I feel hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian elation
That’s supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
The longest words that we are likely to encounter in general text are the twenty-two letter counterrevolutionaries and deinstitutionalization. Then again, there’s the bumper sticker with a twenty-seven-letter, eleven-syllable adverb: “He’s not dead. He’s just electroencephalographically challenged.”
(See CHARGOGGAGOGGMANCHAUGGAGOGGCHAUBUNAGUNGAMAUGG, FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION, HIPPOPOTOMONSTROSESQUIPEDALIAN, HONORIFICABILITUDINITATIBUS, LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDDROBWLLLLANTYSILOGOGOCH, SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS.)
Poetry. Reverse the two halves and you get Try Poe. Not a bad idea.
Edgar Allan Poe possesses one of the most misspelled middle names in literary history. It’s not Alan or Allen; it’s Allan, the last name of the family that took him in as a child.
Poe’s “The Raven” is one of the best-known poems in American literature. It’s dexterous internal rhymes, restless trochaic meter, and “Nevermore” refrain have inspired a parade of parodies, one of the best being “Ravin’s of a Piute Poet Poe,” by C. L. Edson, which begins:
Once upon a midnight dreary—eerie, scary—I was wary; I was weary,
full of sorry, thinking of my lost Lenore.
Of my cheery, eerie, faery, fiery dearie—nothing more.
I lay napping when a rapping on the overlapping coping
Woke me—grapping, yapping, groping—I went hopping,
Leaping!, hoping that the rapping on the coping
Was my little lost Lenore.
That, on opening the shutter, to admit the latter critter,
In she’d flutter from the gutter, with her bitter eyes aglitter.
So I opened wide the door—what was there?
The dark weir and the drear moor—or, I’m a liar!:
The dark mire, the drear moor, the mere door …
And nothing more.
Polish. A capitonym is a word that changes meaning and pronunciation when it is capitalized, as illustrated in these quatrains:
Job’s Job
In August, an august patriarch,
Was reading an ad in Reading, Mass.
Long-suffering Job secured a job
To polish piles of Polish brass.
Herb’s Herbs
An herb store owner, name of Herb,
Moved to rainier Mt. Rainier.
It would have been so nice in Nice,
And even tangier in Tangier.
Here are a dozen more capital capitonyms:
Begin/begin
Breathed/breathed
Colon/colon
Concord/concord
Degas/degas
Guy/guy
Levy/levy
Lima/lima
Messier/messier
Millet/millet
Natal/natal
Ravel/ravel
(See BOLT, ENTRANCE.)
Politics. The word politics derives from poly, “many,” (as in polygamy, polytheism, and polyglot) and tics, which are blood-sucking parasites. Just kidding. In truth, politics issues from the Greek word pólitēs 
, “city, citizen.”
Here’s a story about what may be the most brilliant use of language ever in the field of politics:
The 1950 Florida Democratic primary for the Senate pitted incumbent Claude Pepper against then-Congressman George Smathers. Here’s my expansion of a statement that, according to political folklore, appeared in unsigned pamphlets and in actual stump orations that Smathers trotted around the North Florida pinelands.
Pepper lost the race but went on to a long and distinguished service in the House. Smathers retired from the senate in 1971, vigorously denying responsibility until the end but acknowledged that the tale had “gone into the history books.” Whether apocryphal or authentic, the “speech” provides a lively example of how a politician can sling muddle at opponents without getting taken to court:
My fellow citizens, it is my patriotic duty to inform you of some disturbing facts about my opponent.
Are you aware of the fact the senator is a known sexagenarian? He is a flagrant Homo sapiens who for years has been practicing celibacy all by himself. He has been seen on repeated occasions masticating in public restaurants. In fact, my opponent is a confessed heterosexual who advocates and even participates in social intercourse in mixed company.
His very home is a den of propinquity. The place is suffused with an atmosphere of incense, and there, in the privacy of his own residence, he practices nepotism and extroversion with members of his own family.
Now let’s take a closer look at the salubrious acts committed by members of the senator’s family.
It is a controvertible fact that his father, who died of a degenerative disease, made his money publishing phonographic magazines and distributing literature about horticulture.
His mother was a known equestrienne who nourished colts on her country estate and practiced her diversions out in the field.
His daughter, who is powerfully attracted to sects, is a well-known proselyte who accosts lay people outside of churches and plies them with hoary platitudes.
His son matriculates openly at Harvard University and is a member of an all-male sextet.
For many years his sister was employed as a floorwalker, and she practiced her calling in some of our city’s best department stores.
His brother is so susceptible to moral suasion that he has been advocating oral hygiene for the masses.
And at this very moment the senator’s wife is off in wicked New York City living the life of a thespian and performing her histrionic acts before paying customers, many of whom are heroine addicts.
Now I ask you: Do you want a man with such an explicable and veracious reputation occupying public office? Under his influence, our youth might convert to altruism. Clearly a vote for my opponent is a vote for the perpetuation of all we hold dear. A vote for me is a vote for the very antithesis of the American Way.
(See CANDIDATE, FILIBUSTER, IDIOT, INAUGURATE, MALAPROPISM, OK, OSTRACIZE.)
Posh. One of the most persistent apocryphal etymologies is the recurrent wheeze that posh, “elegant, swanky,” is an acronym for “p(ort) o(ut), s(tarboard) h(ome),” a beguiling bit of linguistic legerdemain that has taken in a company of estimable scholars. When British colonial emissaries and wealthy vacationers made passage to and from India and the Orient, they often traveled along the coast of Africa on the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company line. Many of these travelers sought ideal accommodations “away from the weather,” on the more comfortable or shady side of the ship. By paying for two staterooms—one portside out, the other starboard home—the very rich could avoid the blazing sun and strong winds both ways, an act of conspicuous consumption that has become synonymous with anything luxurious and ultrasmart.
While the abundant inventiveness here deserves at least a sitting ovation, this etymology of posh is, well, bosh. For one thing, neither the travelers’ literature of the period nor the records of the famous Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company show a jot of reference to posh. For another, an examination of the deck plans of the ships of the period reveals that the cabins were not placed on the port and starboard sides. For a third, posh does not show up in print until 1918.
The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary say nothing of any connection with the location of cabins on ships and either ignore or reject outright the acronymic theory, and all Merriam-Webster dictionaries list the origin as “unknown.” Moreover, the monsoon winds that blow in and out of the Asian heartland shift from winter to summer. This fickle phenomenon changes the location of the sheltered and exposed sides of a ship so that in a given season the ideal location can be starboard out, portside home (hence, soph). More likely and more mundanely, posh hails from a British slang word of the same spelling that means “a dandy.”
(See COP, GOLF.)
Potpourri has come to mean an assortment of pleasant objects in one place, such as a mixture of dried petals and spices kept in an open bowl so that their aroma can be enjoyed. But the etymological antecedents of potpourri are more putrid than pleasant.
Pot is clipped from the Latin potare, “to drink” (as is potion). To pot was added an offshoot of the Latin putrere, “to be rotten,” the same word from which wafts putrid, putrescent, and (yuck) pus. Early Spanish had an expression olla podrida, literally “rotten pot.” The French borrowed it, and from there it passed into English in the early 1600s.
Preamble. Every first-year Latin student learns that the verb ambulare means “to walk” and that the common prefix pre- (as in prefix) derives from a Latin preposition meaning “in front of” or “before.” Thus, a preamble is something that comes walking before something else. In the case of our Constitution, the Preamble is a short, but very important, philosophic statement that walks before the actual Articles of Constitution.
Prelate is beheaded one letter at a time in this reverential ditty:
The prelate did relate a tale
Meant to elate both you and me.
We stayed up late and ate our meal,
“Te deum” sang in key of E.
(See ALONE, PASTERN, REACTIVATION, STARTLING.)
Preposition. It’s easy to see that the word for words that link other words to a sentence, such as in, by, and under, means “put before.” A preposition does indeed come before its object, as in “before its object.”
The most pervasive of all grammar commandments may be the one against using a preposition to end a sentence with. Frankly, that injunction doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Ending a sentence with a preposition is a construction many famous writers are fond of.
Note that all three sentences in the previous paragraph feature terminal prepositions, yet they are perfectly natural statements. The anti-terminal preposition “rule” is a bogus restriction that reposes in no reputable grammar book. In fact, this destructive piece of gossip is so out of whack with the realities of English style that it has engendered the four most famous grammar jokes in the canon.
The most widely circulated anecdote about the terminal preposition involves Sir Winston Churchill, one of the greatest of all English prose stylists. As the story goes, an officious editor had the audacity to “correct” a proof of Churchill’s memoirs by revising a sentence that ended with the outlawed preposition. Sir Winston hurled back at the editor a memorable rebuttal: “This is the sort of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!”
A variation on that story concerns a newspaper columnist who responded snappily to the accusation that he was uncouthly violating the terminal preposition “rule”: “What do you take me for? A chap who doesn’t know how to make full use of all the easy variety the English language is capable of? Don’t you know that ending a sentence with a preposition is an idiom many famous writers are very fond of? They realize it’s a colloquialism a skillful writer can do a great deal with. Certainly it’s a linguistic device you ought to read about.”
For the punster there’s the set-up joke about the prisoner who asks a female guard to marry him on the condition that she help him escape. Here we have a man attempting to use a proposition to end a sentence with.
Then there’s the one about the little boy who has just gone to bed when his father comes into the room carrying a book about Australia. Surprised, the boy asks: “What did you bring that book that I didn’t want to be read to out of from about Down Under up for?”
Now that’s a sentence out of which you can get a lot.
My favorite of all terminal preposition stories involves a boy attending public school and one attending private school who end up sitting next to each other in an airplane. To be friendly, the public schooler turns to the preppie and asks, “What school are you at?”
The private schooler looks down his aquiline nose at the public school student and comments, “I happen to attend an institution at which we are taught to know better than to conclude sentences with prepositions.”
The boy at public school pauses for a moment and then says: “All right, then. What school are you at, dingbat!”
(See PRONOUN, VERB.)
Preposterous is one of those words where the meaning is photographically laid out in front of us. The Latin parent word is praeposterus, “before-after,” suggesting that what should come first comes last and what should come last first, the verbal and proverbial cart before the horse.
(See HYSTERON PROTERON, WORD.)
Preventive. In many horror films, malignant monsters, from giant insects to blobs of glop, writhe about. Unfortunately, such grotesque mutations are not limited to science fiction; they are constantly spawning in our language. We English speakers seem possessed by a desire to use a bloated form of certain words when a more compact form will do. These elongated versions are called “needless variants” and “unnecessary doublets,” and should be assiduously avoided.
Please allow me to orient, not orientate, you to the strategies for avoiding the affectation of gratuitous syllabification:
Use accompanist, not accompanyist; analysis, not analyzation; archetypal, not archetypical; brilliance, not brilliancy; combative, not combatative; compulsory, not compulsorary; connote, not connotate; desalination, not desalinization; empathic, not empathetic; grievous, not grievious; heart rending, not heart-rendering; mischievous, not mischievious; regardless, not irregardless; skittish, not skitterish; spayed, not spayded; and, in most instances, sewage, not sewerage.
These choices constitute a form of preventive maintenance of our English language. True, preventative does repose in many dictionaries, but preventive, especially as an adjective, is generally viewed as the preferred form. That’s why the impeccable Henry W. Fowler, in Modern English Usage, remarks that “preventative is a needless lengthening of an established word, due to oversight and caprice.” That’s why preventive is about five times as common as preventative in modern print sources.
Prince. What English word is singular, but if you add an s, it becomes plural, and if you add another s, it becomes singular again, with a sex change? You got it: prince-princes-princess. A second answer that conforms to this pattern but involves an arcane word is ogre-ogres-ogress.
But wait. There’s more! What English word is singular, but if you add an s, it becomes plural, and if you add another s, it becomes a singular word that can make the first two words vanish?
The solution: care-cares-caress.
Pronoun. Forged from the Latin pro, “in place of” + nomen, “noun or name,” a pronoun replaces a noun. Because pronouns change form in ways that nouns don’t, they create more grammatical atrocities than any other part of speech:
We can list pronouns in the order of one to ten letters: I, we, you, they, their, myself, himself, yourself, ourselves, themselves.
Here’s an unusual use of pronouns to make a point about our lives:
This is a story about four people—Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.
There was an important job to be done, and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody would have done it, but Nobody did it.
Somebody got angry about that because it was Everbody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it.
It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.
(See PREPOSITION, VERB.)
Pumpernickel is etymologically baked from the German pumpern, “to break wind,” and Nickel, “devil, demon, goblin.” The idea is that those who eat the heavy, dark, hard-to-digest rye bread are liable to be smitten by a diabolical flatulence.
(See CAKEWALK, COMPANION, COUCH POTATO, HOAGIE, SALARY, SANDWICH, TOAST.)
Pun. No one is sure of the origin of the word pun, but the best guess is that pun is a shortening of the Italian puntiglio, “a small or fine point.” Punnery is largely the trick of compacting two or more ideas within a single word or expression. Punnery challenges us to apply the greatest pressure per square syllable of language. Punnery surprises us by flouting the law of nature that pretends that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Punnery is an exercise of the mind at being concise.
In addition to blend words and spoonerisms, both illuminated elsewhere in this book, puns can be divided into the following categories:
Using the criteria of verbal pyrotechnics, humor, and popularity of the play on words, I present my picks for the top ten English-language puns of all time. Sharpen your pun cells, O pun pals. Let’s get to wit:
10. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
9. Take my wife—please!—Henny Youngman
8. A good pun is like a good steak—a rare medium well done.
7. As one frog croaked to another: “Time’s fun when you’re having flies!”
6. Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.—Groucho Marx
5. Cowboy singer Roy Rogers went bathing in a creek. Along came a cougar and, attracted by the smell of new leather, began nibbling on one of Roy’s brand new boots, which were sitting by the edge of the water. Dale Evans entered the scene, and noting the critter chomping her husband’s footwear, fired her trusty rifle in the air, scaring the cougar away.
She turned to her husband and asked, “Pardon me, Roy. Was that the cat that chewed your new shoe?”
4. What did the Buddhist priest say to the hot dog vendor? “Make me one with everything.” And the same holy man said to his dentist, “I wish to transcend dental medication.”
3. Two ropes walked into an old western saloon. The first rope went up to the bar and ordered a beer. “We don’t serve ropes in this saloon,” sneered the bartender, who picked up the rope, whirled him around in the air, and tossed him out into the street.
“Oh, oh. I’d better disguise myself,” thought the second rope. He ruffled up his ends to make himself look bigger and twisted himself into a circle. Then he too sidled up to the bar.
“Hmmm. Are you one of them ropes?” snarled the bartender.
“I’m a frayed knot.”
2. You better watch out, or my karma will run over your dogma.
And the number-one pun of all time, created by the incomparable Dorothy Parker:
1. I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
(See BOLT, DAFFYNITION, PHILODENDRON, SPOONERISM, SWIFTY, WITZELSUCHT.)