Plays Upon Language

PLAYING with words has been popular (off and on) since the sixteenth century in English literature and American. If the present day affects to condemn a jeu d’ esprit, the fact remains that when one puns, or understands a pun, in a foreign language one is getting beyond the elementary stage. The late Dean Clédat of Lyon used to explore the possibilities of French in this direction — even when there were no students around; and the old conundrum as to why Paris, the white bear, Byrd, and Virginia (of the famous romance) are like could well be given to intermediate students in that language. (The answer? The first est métropole; the second est maitre au pôle; the third — we may assume — aime etre au pôle, and the fourth aimait trop Paul.)

A young friend of mine, visiting the south of France for the first time and struggling valiantly with the language, ventured to suggest to his landlady that he had heard the best French was spoken at Tours. Unwillingly (for she came from a different section of the country) she admitted that some people thought so; whereat, to cheer her, he remarked that he hardly thought it could be so, since he had heard the tourists speak. As she at once explained that the inhabitants of Tours were not called touristes, he got a free lesson in both language and psychology.

It was a genius who translated the dialogue between the philosopher and his friend into French, keeping the play upon the same word. ’Is life worth living?’ asked the sage. ‘It depends upon the liver — c’est une question de foie,’ came the reply. The difficulties of gender (which wreck many a would-be punster) are here neatly avoided. One might imagine that the inhabitants of northern Long Island had a rare advantage, for it is not often that one can see a Sound; but in a Parisian theatre I once saw a notice: On est prié d’observer le silence.

Years ago an American traveler on the great German river was admiring the picturesqueness of the villages which the steamer passed. A casual acquaintance, a German, could see nothing but the dirt, which (perhaps inevitably) accompanies the picturesque. As each town was characterized as schmutziger than the last, the American was driven to remark that apparently the river was the only thing that was rein — a comment so patently absurd that the German walked away in disgust. Yet he knew that the yellow water below was the Rhein. . . .

The bilingual pun may be represented by two examples, both of which are perhaps apocryphal, but none the less worth preserving. It is reported that the late Professor Barrett Wendell met a distinguished Frenchman in New York and took him from the steamer to a club where the seals of two universities were displayed in juxtaposition. Reading Veritas on one, and Lux et Veritas on the other, the foreigner, obviously not acclimated, asked ‘ Pourquoi la différence?’ Immediately his host replied, ‘ Parce que chez eux, la vérité est un article de luxe.’ The other example is not unrelated and concerns the second device, which, carved in stone, was being hoisted over the door of a New York clubhouse under construction. Two members of a club across the street were watching the operation, and one said to the other, ‘That’s a pretty good idea; I think we should have a motto, too.’

‘What would you suggest?’

The first man ruminated, then, reading Lux et Veritas, murmured, ‘Why not ducks et demitasse?' It would have been appropriate.

The thought of food recalls the conundrum as to why a Frenchman rarely eats more than one egg. Because, having eaten that, he has had un œuf. Many English travelers, seeking relief, have paradoxically sought Aix — without being relieved from payin’. In the first World War the blockade failed to deprive Germany of Essen — and England kept Eton; but she found the Kiel Canal well-named, for many German keels were stored there. A Zurich specialist, interviewing an American patient, wished to find out if she was suffering pain. The English word escaped him, but he remembered the Latin dolor and the French douleur, and, with a sudden inspiration, asked the lady: ’Haf you dollars?’ This was unfortunate, and (for all I know) costly; but it shows that a pun is not always exactly funny, and may easily be unintentional.

Perhaps not paronomasial, but surely not unrelated to plays upon words, are those translations of colloquial terms which one sometimes runs into — such as hypselometopy (‘high-brow’) and Professor Grandgent’s osteocephalic (‘bone-headed’). If you hesitate to call your neighbors ‘roughnecks,’ you might try dasylophic (δασύς, dasús, and λóΦος, lóphos) or trachyauchenic (τραΧύς, trachús, and αύΧήν, auchén). It does not take much to reduce the real ‘high-brow’ to silence; I mean, by this term, a person who is not interested in things cultural for their own sake, but for the impression his apparent interest makes upon his neighbors.

Akin to these fabrications are the etymologies which one does not find in the dictionaries: such as that of the gourmet who derived restaurant from res and taurus, because he considered it a ‘bully thing’; or of the visitor who left the small town calling it a ‘unique’ city — from unus and equus. It w’as a confirmed bachelor who explained the origin of virgin from vir and the old English gin, ‘a trap,’ and we might be excused nowadays for deriving plutocracy from Pluto, of the underworld, rather than from Plutus. But the punster does not have to invent his etymologies; there are plenty of words which can be connected in the lexicons. Paradoxically, you are bored if you are thrilled — it would not be surprising to find a welldrilled soldier in that condition. The common element in such widely separated names as Des Moines, Monaco, and München takes us out of the realm of language into that of history.

A humorous etymology is suggested by the Latin lucvs a non lucendo — a playful derivation of lucvs, ‘grove,’ from lucere, ‘to shine.’ A serious etymology, resulting in a Greek pun, is lost in the translation of Matthew xvi.18; but a French reader finds in Pierre a common noun, and understands the play upon words. Lamb records his old master’s hearty laughter at Flaccus’s pun on rex — where the word has a double meaning of ‘monarch’ and a private surname, comparable to the English patronymic King. While it is not considered good taste to pun on a person’s name, — largely because the individual in question must have heard the pun so often that he tires of it, — once in a while the pun is so original, apropos, and fresh, that it justifies itself. In recounting it not only the play, but the circumstances in which it was made, must be repeated — and of course this removes the spontaneity of the first running. Many such bons mots are recorded in Collections and Recollections — that gossipy picture of Victorian London and Londoners by G. W. E. Russell — of which we may cite a couple of examples : —

Lord Knightley (who was the living double of Dickens’s Sir Leicester Dedlock) had been expatiating after dinner on the undoubted glories of his famous pedigree. The company was getting a little restive under the recitation, when Sir William Harcourt was heard to say, in an appreciative aside, ‘This reminds me of Addison’s evening hymn —

Surely the force of apt citation can no further go.

Here was apt citation with a pun on a proper name; Russell cites another instance of aptness — based on parody as well as punning — when Lord Tennyson chanced to say in Sir William Harcourt’s hearing that his pipe after breakfast was the most enjoyable of the day; Sir William softly murmured the Tennysonian line —

Continues Mr. Russell: ‘Some historians say that he substituted “bards” for “birds,” and the reception accorded by the poet to the parody was not as cordial as its excellence deserved.’

A joke may please, and a joke may hurt; when the question of two languages enters, international bad feeling may be aroused. There was the Shah who was sensitive, during his visit to Paris, at references to ‘gray cats’ — for shah sounds like chat, and gris, in French slang, suggests a lack of sobriety. During the first World War, Punch printed a picture of an English officer offering a cigarette to a French companion with the question, ‘Êles-vous un fumier, monsieur? ‘ to which the French officer, always polite, responds in the affirmative. We are here on the borders of the ‘boner,’ where wit, when it exists, is unconscious, and consequently pathetic; but the mistake above recorded had a point, coming from an English periodical, which it might have lost had it appeared in a French paper. Both sides of the Channel could laugh at it, taking it in good part.

Even in playing with one’s own language no real humorist hurts another’s feelings — in bilingual wit one must take extra precautions not to provoke anger. I have known French teachers to become upset at a student, not for translating fausses dentelles (‘machine-made lace’), on a mantelpiece, by ‘false teeth,’ but for seeming to think that the French exhibited their dentures in the salon. Even the obvious ignorance of the student could not placate the irate pedagogues.

ROBERT WITHINGTON