hE TOPPLED THE TOWER OF BABEL:

In the beginning was the word. But the trouble was that the word sounded like other words. And it still does, so you poke at it. This is called "punning". For there was never just the one, solitary, word. It entered the world as one of many. Though each word seemed to possess a specific shade of meaning all its own, they were tied together by invisible lines of phonetic resemblance. The mouth has limits. Tongue, palate, cheeks, and lips can only shape a breath of air in so many ways. Perhaps this was not true for God, when He blew on the face of the waters and His breath - "wind" in one translation of the Hebrew word ruach - hovered there, but it is true for us. And we can be tempted to tug at the invisible lines of phonetic resemblance, to create puns, even - perhaps especially - when it annoys our friends and loved ones.

I pun compulsively. Puns are my constant companions, a floating cloud of potential associations superimposed on the field of linear communication. It is as if I cannot stop touching the words. I read ruach and it becomes Rauch, from the Hebrew for "wind" to the German for "smoke". Some words summon the punch lines to jokes I haven't made yet, and I grin inwardly. The Japanese expression itadakimasu, an expression of thanks for a meal to come, makes me think: "eat a duck I must". As a hundred books of puns destined for use as bathroom reading attest, I'm not alone. (There is in fact a neurological condition characterized by compulsive punning, originally called Witzelsucht, or "joke-seeking", by Hermann Oppenheimer, who identified it in the late nineteenth century. I swear I don't have it.) I was visiting Kyoto's Fushimi Inari shrine with a friend, who told me that the Japanese word for pun is oyajigyagu, or "old guy gag". Puns are the jokes older men tell. Wordplay does not float free from culture.

Puns are supposed to be on the whole bad - Samuel Johnson said of Shakespeare's love of the "quibble", or pun, that "a quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation" - but they are linked to something often praised in literature, namely ambiguity. In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), William Empson acknowledged that ambiguity can mean indecision, but it can also communicate an insight into the basic predicament of meaning in the world: things aren't as neat as we wish they were.

Tweet   @brothersjudd