Our culture abounds with word plays. They are used not only to amuse and entertain but also to market and sell products. We encounter them in movies and TV shows, in greeting cards and headlines, on bumper stickers and T-shirts, and in business logos and advertisements. For whatever reason, our culture enjoys well-constructed word plays and sometimes rewards those who are particularly good at creating them. Beyond the professional applications, many people just enjoy playing with language for fun.

Some of the cleverest word plays are built around grammatical idiosyncrasies in our language. For example, Groucho Marx's famous line "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" relies on an overlap in the forms for our noun plurals and our present tense singular verbs. But despite the potential usefulness of knowing how the features of our grammar can be tapped to create clever structural word plays, this application of grammatical study remains remarkably unexplored.

The book Know More Funny Business: A Grammatical Guide to Word Plays is a clear and interesting exploration of the grammatical word play potentials within our language and how they can be effectively combined through various patterns and formulas. As part of its discussion, this book contains numerous jokes and word plays illustrating the concepts being discussed, making the book a readable, fascinating, and useful investigation of the language.

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For more information read The Back Story.

Dallin D. Oaks is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and English Language at Brigham Young University. He is the editor of Linguistics at Work: A Reader of Applications and the co-author of An Introductory English Grammar. His research has also been published in such journals as The Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Humor: the International Journal of Humor Research, and General Linguistics.

Most people believe that the value of studying grammar is primarily in how it can help us to speak and write more clearly and correctly, but it can also help in writing tasks that demand overt ambiguity, such as making cleverly constructed word plays for humor and advertising.

During his doctoral studies at Purdue University, Professor Oaks became interested in structural ambiguities, which are at the heart of some of the most creative word plays. As he became more aware of the specific behavior of various words and grammatical structures and how they collaborate to create word plays, he realized that people wouldn't always have to rely exclusively on random flashes of creative insight to craft new word plays. Instead, they could manipulate identifiable patterns and formulas.

As an enthusiastic teacher and writer, Professor Oaks is eager to share with others the grammatical insights he has acquired over the last eighteen years.

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