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Key points
- Wordplay is intrinsic to understanding the role of language in the mind.
- When we are solving a word-based puzzle, we are experimenting with thought.
- The survival of human civilization depends on the preservation of words.
No other faculty of mind differentiates human beings from other species as does language. We use it to encode ideas, to pass knowledge on to subsequent generations, to think, to communicate, to entertain ourselves, and so on and so forth. It is no exaggeration to say that the survival of human civilization depends on the preservation of words. Without them, we would have to start anew, literally rebuilding knowledge with new words.
The origins and functions of language have always been of interest to philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists, who have put forth theories and models of how language originated and how it develops in children spontaneously. Puzzle-makers, too, have been fascinated by the relation between language and the mind, but they have approached it from a unique angle—a ludic, playful one. In its own peculiar way, wordplay provides miniature insights into the relation between language and thought. In this blog post, I will deal with puzzle genres that illustrate this “interplay” concretely (pun intended). For instance,
- Riddles play on double (and even triple) entendre, never referring directly to something, as does literal speech, but connecting words in such a way as to shed nonobvious light on something.
- Word and phrase anagrams, which involve rearranging the letters of a given word or phrase to produce another word or phrase, show how the sounds of words are not put together randomly, but according to rules of word formation.
- Jumbles, or puzzles in which the letters of a word have been scrambled, and palindromes, words or phrases that can be read in both directions, also cast light on word structure.
- Cryptograms, whereby the letters of words are replaced by other letters or symbols, engage our sense of mystery in a simple way.
- Rebuses involving the layout of words show how we extract meaning from arrangements and combinations.
- Odd-one-out puzzles, whereby we have to identify the word that does not fit in with other words, and word-sequence puzzles, whereby we have to infer what the next word in a series of words will be, play on a basic function of language—classification according to sense or structure.
- Finally, the doublet (also called word ladder), which is Lewis Carroll’s puzzle masterpiece, gets us to transform one given word into another, changing one letter at a time, with each change constituting a legitimate word of its own. This brings out a key feature of language that linguists call phonemic—namely, the fact that a single sound change can produce a different meaning, as can be seen in pairs such as cat–rat or pin–bin.
To adopt a term coined by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in 1938, wordplay is a product of what he called homo ludens—the playful sibling of homo sapiens. Wordplay provides an indirect means to grasp how crucial the relationship between language and the mind is. The two are inextricable. When we are solving some word-based puzzle, we are experimenting with thought. Arguably, this is what makes wordplay so alluring. The ancients even saw riddles as models of the human condition. The famous Riddle of the Sphinx, for example, contained an entire philosophy in a capsule—namely, that life’s three phases of infancy, adulthood, and old age are analogous, respectively, to the three phases of a day (morning, noon, and night). Its function in the Oedipus story, moreover, suggests that riddles were tests of heroic intelligence and, thus, probes of character and moral fiber.
In sum, the relation between words and thought is unmistakable, and wordplay casts direct light on this relation. As the late book and film critic Richard Eder so aptly put it: “Words are the legs of the mind; they bear it about, carry it from point to point, bed it down at night, and keep it off the ground and out of the marsh and mists.”
Puzzles
1. A riddle: What strange thing can be done in someone’s face and all the way to the bank?
2. A word anagram: What new word can you make by rearranging all the letters in vessel?
3. A phrase anagram: What phrase can you make by rearranging the letters in the words of the following proverb?: A stitch in time saves nine.
4. A cryptogram: By decoding the following encrypted statement you will get a famous saying by the late congressman John Lewis: VQQ OCPA QH WU UXKNN DGNKGXG QWT FKHHGTGPEGU FGHKPG WU
5. A rebus: What expression does the following represent? HISTORY-HISTORY-HISTORY-HISTORY-HISTORY
6. A jumble: By unscrambling each word, you will get three different viable answers to the same question: What do we have a lot of?
(a) RPOLBEMS
(b) RORWSIE
(c) TSOBLUER
7. A palindrome: This seven-letter palindrome refers to a type of vehicle.
8. An odd-one-out puzzle: In this list of seven words, one does not belong. Can you figure out which one?
FRIEND
DOG
CAR
SISTER
TEACHER
FIREFIGHTER
CHIMPANZEE
9. A word sequence puzzle: Which word comes next, logically?
LIVES, VEILS, EVILS, LEVIS, …
10. A doublet: Can you go from GRAIN to WHEAT in three steps? Each step must be a legitimate word that differs from the previous one by only one letter.
Answers
1. laugh: as in Laugh in someone’s face (to show contempt) and Laugh all the way to the bank (to make a lot of money very easily).
2. selves
3. Is this meant as incentive? Or This is meant as incentive!
4. Too many of us still believe our differences define us. Each letter is replaced by the second one after it in the alphabet: T is replaced by V, O by Q, and so on.
5. History repeats itself.
6. (a) PROBLEMS, (b) WORRIES, (c) TROUBLES
7. racecar
8. CAR: This refers to an inanimate object; all the others refer to living beings.
9. ELVIS: The words in the sequence are anagrams of each other.
10. CRUST - crest - chest - cheat - WHEAT
