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Favorite Trivia – WORDS AND WORDPLAY
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| “GRAMMAR: The difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit.”
The B Word Engagement Calendar |
| “Jennie is a sweet, talkative senior citizen whom we see on an alternating basis with her periodontist (gum specialist) . . . I do my best to be polite, exchanging small talk with her, but I keep my hands in her mouth as much as possible so I can finish her prophy on time.” [January 15, 1821]
Career Diary of a Dental Hygienist – Nancy Aulie |
| Hinky Pinky
One person starts by asking the other(s) to guess what his or her hinky pinky is (an adjective with a rhyming noun) by providing synonyms for each rhymed word. Examples: |
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pangram – A sentence that uses all the letters of the alphabet, i.e., “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.”
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| “‘I never knew words could be so confusing,’ Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog’s ear.
‘Only when you use a lot to say a little,’ answered Tock.” The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster |
| Simili’s:
“In a sea of comedians who sport faded t-shirts and ill-fitting jeans, Argus Hamilton stands out like a hijab at a Trump rally.” LA Weekly, December 22-28, 2107 – Kelly Maclean |
| Metaphors:
The waves splashed white beside him and sometimes basted his ankles.” John Steinbeck – Sweet Thursday |
| “[Noah K.] Davis asserts that the paronomasia or pun is the sophism of equivocation,’ and quotes an agèd example: ‘Two men ate oysters for a wager; one ate ninety-nine, but the other ate two more, for he ate a hundred and won.'”
Walter Redfern – Puns |
| “Anybody living in New York has felt the NYP [New York Post] effect before. It’s a phenomenon where something happens in the world and, whatever your politics, you absolutely need to know how the Post will approach it in shouty World War III font. You can’t wait to get near a newsstand to see . . . like telling disgraced Subway spokesman Jared Fogle to ENJOY A FOOT LONG IN JAIL?. . .
“The editors use word association sites to spark ideas for common phrases, and the rhyming dictionary site Rhymezone to help twist them into something new. They use IMDb, Wikipedia, and digital thesauruses. . . “The pun in a headline has to play off both the sound of the words and the direction of the story. Also, it has to be polished enough to seem obvious in retrospect. The ideal pun headline should make readers furious they didn’t come up with it first.“ Away With Words: An Irreverent Tour Through The World of Pun Competitions – Joe Berkowitz |
| Insults:
“At least my mother ain’t no railroad track, laid all over the country.” “Your mother’s like a police station—dicks going in and out all the time. |
| “An oxymoron is a verbal gargoyle which smiles and frowns at once.”
Noah J. Jacobs |
| “I looked at William, his dashing cossack-sort of appearance so impossible to imagine naked beside me. It wasn’t the way he looked that made him impossible. It was what he said. It was his sense of humor. He would not resist a pun. And any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me.”
Eve Babitz – Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, And L.A. |
| “The Bear Flag was taken over by Dora’s next of kin . . . . She read horoscopes and continued, after hours at least, to transform the Bear Flag into a kind of finishing school for girls. She was named Flora, but one time in the Mission a gentleman bum finished his soup and said, ‘Flora, you seem more a fauna-type to me.’
“‘Say, I like that,’ she said. ‘Mind if I keep it?’ And she did. She was Fauna ever afterward.” John Steinbeck – Sweet Thursday |
| “Aphorisms are not the warm and fuzzy phrases found in greeting cards. They are much more brusque, confrontational and subversive. You don’t curl up with a good book of aphorisms; they leap off the page and unfurl inside you. . .
“Aphorisms are spurs to action. It’s not enough to just read one and murmur sagely to yourself, ‘How true, how true.’ Aphorisms make you want to do something; admiring them without putting them into practice is like learning to read music but neglecting to play an instrument. “An aphorist, Chateaubriand had a wicked way with a turn of phrase. Aphorisms achieve their maximum impact through paradox and sudden reversals of import. Reading a good aphorism is like watching a magic trick: First comes surprise, then comes delight, then you start wondering how the hell the magician did it. . . “Like a good joke, a good aphorism has a punch line, a quick verbal or psychological flip, a sudden sting in the tail that gives you a jolt. Both jokes and aphorisms lift you into a wonderful weightless state—that giddy point just after the joke is finished and just before you get it—then abruptly drop you back down to earth in some completely unexpected place. Aphorisms, like jokes, teach the mind to do the twist.” James Geary – The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism |
| “How do you recognize an aphorism when you read it? And what makes an aphorism different from other types of sayings, such as adages, apothegms, axioms, bromides, dictums, epigrams, mottoes, parables, platitudes, precepts, proverbs, quips, quotations, sound bites, slogans, truisms, and witticisms? Ironically for the world’s shortest form of literature, a compact definition of the aphorism is impossible. There are, however, five laws an aphorism must obey to make the grade. By these signs shall ye know them.
“The five laws of Aphorisms:
James Geary – The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism |
| “The Seventh Commandment is thou shalt not admit adultery.”
“A Christian can have only one wife. This is called monotony.” “In one edition of today’s food Section, an inaccurate number of jalapeño peppers was given for Jeanette Crowley’s Southwestern chicken salad recipe. The recipe should call for two, not 21, jalapeño peppers.” “She is suffering from postmortem depression.” “I love academia nuts.” More Anguished English – Richard Lederer |