Word play  

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This page Word play is part of the wit series.Illustration: House of Nonsense (1911), one of Blackpool's funhouse attractions
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This page Word play is part of the wit series.
Illustration: House of Nonsense (1911), one of Blackpool's funhouse attractions

Les dents, la bouche.
Les dents la bouchent,
l'aidant la bouche.
L'aide en la bouche.
Laides en la bouche.
Laid dans la bouche.
Lait dans la bouche.
L'est dam le à bouche.
Les dents-là bouche.

--"Les dents, la bouche" (1900) by Jean-Pierre Brisset

Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel at Night (1882) by Paul Bilhaud is a form of word play/image play
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Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel at Night (1882) by Paul Bilhaud is a form of word play/image play
The Bouba/kiki effect (1929)

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Word play or wordplay is a literary technique and a form of wit in which the words that are used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement. Examples of word play include puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, double entendres, and telling character names (such as in the play The Importance of Being Earnest, Ernest being a given name that sounds exactly like the adjective earnest).

Interestingly enough, strictly visual orthographic word play is much less predominant than sound-based word play in alphabetically written literatures. This may be due to the fundamental orality of written communication in those literatures, as compared with word play in ideographically written literatures such as the Chinese.

Most writers engage in word play to some extent, but certain writers are particularly adept or committed to word play. Shakespeare's "quibbles" have made him a noted punster. P.G. Wodehouse was also hailed as a "comic genius recognized in his lifetime as a classic and an old master of farce" for his ingenious wordplay. James Joyce, author of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is another noted word-player. For example, Joyce's phrase "they were yung and easily freudened" clearly conveys the meaning "young and easily frightened," but it also makes puns on the names of two famous psychoanalysts, Jung and Freud.

Other writers closely identified with word play include:

The Apocryphal book of Susanna has elements of word play in its original Greek.

Plays can enter common usage as neologisms.

Word play is closely related to word games, that is, games in which the point is manipulating words. See also language game for a linguist's variation. The Hungarian term for wordplay, occasionally used in the circle for its diaeres is Szójáték.

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Word play" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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