Playing With The Words 2.3

[Everardo Frost]

Anambigram is a word or artistic representation that can be viewed or interpreted from a different direction, perspective, or orientation. This website shows over 40 ambigrams, including rotational ambigrams, mirror-image ambigrams, and chain style ambigrams.

To create an anagram, you'll need to rearrange the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase. For example, the letters in "debit card" can be rearranged to read "bad credit." Iconic American singer "Jim Morrison" is an anagram for "Mr. Mojo Risin." Anagrams were important elements in Dan Brown's bestselling novel The DaVinci Code, when the main character discovers that "O, Draconian devil!" is an anagram for "Leonardo Da Vinci," "Oh, lame saint!" is an anagram for "The Mona Lisa," and "So dark the con of Man" is an anagram for "Madonna of the Rocks."

When someone bears an aptronym, it means they have a name that is considered to be amusingly appropriate to their occupation. Some examples include William Headline, who was a bureau chief for CNN, and Amy Freeze, a meteorologist. There was also Stuart Fell, who was a BBC stunt coordinator and Thomas Crapper, who manufactured Victorian toilets.

Backronyms are phrases that are constructed to spell out a certain word or acronym to create a reverse acronym. With an acronym, the phrase comes first. With a backronym, the word comes first. For example, when 9-year-old Amber Hagerman was abducted and murdered in Texas in 1996, the call that went out was referred to as an "Amber alert." Later, the program became known as "America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response," making "Amber" a backronym.

A blend or portmanteau is created by merging the sounds and meanings of two or more words. Some common examples are "brunch" (a blend of "breakfast" and "lunch"), "chocaholic" (a blend of "chocolate" and "alcoholic"), and "glamping" ("glamour" and "camping").

A contronym is a word that evokes contradictory or reverse meanings depending on the context. Specifically, a contronym is a word with a homonym (another word with the same spelling but different meaning) that is also an antonym (a word with the opposite meaning). For example, the word "screen" can have two different definitions that are opposite the other, depending on context. The first definition is to protect or conceal, as in "sunscreen" or wearing a hat to "screen" one's face from the sun. The second definition is to show or broadcast a movie or TV episode. In this definition, we might go to a theater downtown that will "screen" a new movie. The first definition insinuates hiding while the second insinuates showing, and they are therefore opposite.

An eggcorn is a word or phrase that is mistakenly used for another word or phrase because it sounds similar and seems logical or plausible. Examples include "old-timers disease" instead of "Alzheimer's disease" or "lip singing" instead of "lip syncing."

An eponym is a person, place, or thing after whom or after which something is named, or believed to be named. The adjectives derived from eponym are eponymous and eponymic. For example, the Greek hero Achilles is the eponym for an Achilles' heel. One's signature is often referred to as a "John Hancock," named after John Hancock, was one of the signers of the Declarations of Independence who had a unique signature.

If your name is in ironic opposition to what or who you are, then it is an inaptronym. For example, the only member who didn't have a beard in the American rock group ZZ Top was Frank Beard. Another example would be the infamous white supremacist named Don Black or Samuel Foote, an actor who lost his leg in a horseback-riding accident.

An isogram is a logological term for a word or phrase without a repeating letter. It can also mean a word phrase in which each letter appears the same number of times. Some examples of isograms include customizable, lexicography, unforgivable, and imprudently.

A lipogram is writing a word or phrase that purposefully excludes a letter of the alphabet. For example, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet except "s". A longer example is Fate of Nassan, an anonymous poem written pre-1870, in which each stanza is a lipogrammatic pangram using every letter of the alphabet except "e".

A malaprop is the use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical, sometimes humorous utterance. An example is when Former Texas Governor Rick Perry described states as "lavatories of innovation and democracy" instead of "laboratories of innovation and democracy." Another example is saying "for all intensive purposes" instead of "for all intents and purposes."

A mondegreen is a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of the lyrics of a song. A common example is when Jimi Hendrix sang, "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky," it was misheard by many as "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy." Another classic example is The Ramones, singing "I wanna' be sedated," which came across sounding like "I wanna' piece of bacon."

A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the end of the sentence or phrase is not what's expected, causing the listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. Mostly, you'll find that it is done for humorous effect, which is why comedians use it a lot.

A semordnilaps is a word that makes sense when spelled backwards but takes on a different meaning. An example is Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Studios. Other examples are "desserts" and "stressed" or "live" and "evil."

A spoonerism is a play on words in which letters or syllables get swapped. An example is the famous George Carlin quote, "Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things," or the NOFX album Punk In Drublic, which is a spoonerism of the legal offense of being "drunk in public."

Perhaps group some of them or play around with putting words together that you might never have thought about putting together before. How will you group your words? Which words could you join together? What effects does it create? Does it give you an image in your mind? Which combinations do you like the sound of?

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A few weeks ago, I opened an Instagram account to play with words. There is nothing I enjoy more than puzzling over the right words to translate puns, idioms, marketing slogans, alliterations, childhood rhymes, and other play on words. If a phrase caught my attention, I would translate it in my head or write it down in a notebook, but I had no platform to share it with others. Until I found Instagram.

A Tom Swifty is a fun use of words that follows a quote, usually said by a fictional Tom, using a punny adverb. The term Tom Swifty was coined by writer Willard Espy and named after the Tom Swift series of books, which tended to use a lot of adverbs to describe dialogue.

A spoonerism is a, usually accidental, swapping of initial sounds of two words. The term spoonerism is named for Oxford lecturer William Archibald Spooner, a notoriously nervous speaker who often swapped the beginnings of words when he spoke publicly.

A pangram is a phrase or sentence that includes every letter of the alphabet. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is a famous example of a pangram. Some other fun examples of things that rely on alphabet-based challenges include lipograms, heterograms, tautograms, autograms, and kangaroo words.

These four words all have to do with using words that have similar sounds. Most people are familiar with rhyming, which typically refers to using words with similar-sounding endings as in The big pig ate a fig. The word alliteration means to use words with similar-sounding beginnings or words that start with the same letter. Assonance means to use similar-sounding vowels anywhere in words when rhyming, whereas consonance means to use similar-sounding consonant sounds anywhere in words when making a rhyme.

Now that you know a multitude of ways to have fun with English, keep these terms in your back pocket with our handy word list. You can take advantage of flashcards, spelling quizzes, and more. Then, put on your party hat and have some fun with our quiz on all these types of word play!

Word play or wordplay[1] (also: play-on-words) is a literary technique and a form of wit in which words 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).

Word play is quite common in oral cultures as a method of reinforcing meaning. Examples of text-based (orthographic) word play are found in languages with or without alphabet-based scripts, such as homophonic puns in Mandarin Chinese.

Most writers engage in word play to some extent, but certain writers are particularly committed to, or adept at, word play as a major feature of their work . Shakespeare's "quibbles" have made him a noted punster. Similarly, P.G. Wodehouse was hailed by The Times as a "comic genius recognized in his lifetime as a classic and an old master of farce" for his own acclaimed wordplay.[citation needed] James Joyce, author of Ulysses, is another noted word-player. For example, in his Finnegans Wake Joyce's phrase "they were yung and easily freudened" clearly implies the more conventional "they were young and easily frightened"; however, the former also makes an apt pun on the names of two famous psychoanalysts, Jung and Freud.

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