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My fascination with language strategies and tricks goes back quite awhile. When I was just a kid my parents gave me a ventriloquist dummy and an old LP record with some basic instructions on how to create the ventriloquists' illusion. Among the tricks that I learned is that by substituting some sounds for others (for example pronouncing a th sound where we would normally pronounce the f sound), a person can speak without moving his or her lips. Of course there is much more to a ventriloquist's illusion than merely not moving one's lips. But I found my newly acquired strategies to be interesting and fun. Perhaps even at that young age I began to form my long-held opinion that learning about language is not only fun but often has useful applications, sometimes even in ways we might not initially anticipate.
Later, as I studied Spanish and Italian in my teenage and young adult years, I became fascinated with how an awareness of Latin-based roots found in English could help me more easily memorize and learn the Spanish and Italian words I was studying. My fascination with the etymologies of words only grew as I studied more about the history of the English language.
I eventually got a graduate degree that prepared me to become an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher. In that setting I had numerous opportunities to reflect on the structure of the language in ways that native speakers rarely consider. In order to provide explanations to non-native speakers about why native speakers say things the way that they do, I needed to have a conscious, not merely an intuitive, understanding of the individual components of the language. The kinds of grammatical categories and classifications such as transitive versus intransitive verbs, common versus proper nouns, the various parts of speech, etc. that I had been taught about at an earlier time but whose significance I hadn't really appreciated suddenly acquired great relevance, even more than I had appreciated when learning to speak foreign languages. I became more aware of the ways in which the various parts of the language fit together and how these parts of the language influence each other.
After teaching ESL for a couple of years I enrolled in a doctoral program at Purdue University, where I became interested in structural ambiguities, in other words, ambiguities in which the structure, not merely a word's meaning, is ambiguous. Structural ambiguities are found at the heart of some of the cleverest word plays, whether in humor or advertising.
Given my predisposition to look for application of the linguistic information I was learning, it wasn't long before I began to consider whether what I was learning about how structural ambiguities are formed could be usefully applied in deliberately creating structural word plays. Could people in advertising, marketing, humor writing (whether doing T-shirt logos, greeting cards, bumper stickers, television or movie scripts, etc.) actually benefit from a structural description about how to manipulate the language to yield structural word plays? The answer appears to be that they could. And for those people who can't imagine ever wanting to create an ambiguous word play, I invite them to consider whether some conscious training in how structural ambiguities are formed might not help in recognizing and avoiding ambiguities in their own writing.
So here we are. I invite you to explore with me some of the quirky and yet fascinating ways that our language behaves to create those kinds of word plays that you have appreciated but perhaps mistakenly thought were random occurrences in the language. Even if you have no aspirations for creating clever structural word plays, this book will undoubtedly acquaint you with a fresh perspective and understanding and even appreciation of grammar.
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