Of Punning Penury

What's in a Name

Extra Pound called his friends, Rat and Kit,
not that he could've called them "Brad" and "Pitt,"
for these were nicknames, none,
but a calling for each one,
to take note of time and waste it not a bit.

Another Pun in Paradise Lost? Probably not.

The Grieslie King?
Tartini's Dream (1824)
by Louis-Léopold Boilly

Consider the unfallen angels' search for Satan in this passage of Book 4, Paradise Lost, borrowed from Dartmouth's Milton Reading Room:

[The band of angels went quickly from their consultation,]
In search of whom they sought: him there they found
Squat like a Toad, close at the eare of Eve; [ 800 ]
Assaying by his Devilish art to reach
The Organs of her Fancie, and with them forge
Illusions as he list, Phantasms and Dreams,
Or if, inspiring venom, he might taint
Th' animal spirits that from pure blood arise [ 805 ]
Like gentle breaths from Rivers pure, thence raise
At least distemperd, discontented thoughts,
Vaine hopes, vaine aimes, inordinate desires
Blown up with high conceits ingendring pride.

What I wish to ask - though I much doubt the actual possibility - is whether or not the "Toad" of line 800 might possibility be a pun on the German word "Tod," for "Tod" means death, and death is a thing that Satan brought into the world?

But I won't press this suggestion very far, as I doubt there is a pun. This query does, however, raise another question, a necessary one, namely, how do we recognize a genuine pun?

There ought to be a law . . .

Punishment

for a

Punster

"No good deed goes unpublished!"

It's all self-praise these days!

Inequality?

Inequality

The textbook I use asked  students to think of any quality they respect and admire, so I repeated the request, which got some muttering, e.g., "I don't respect and admire inequality," which made me realize that:

"Any quality" sounds like "inequality."

Which I then explained, to the general relief of all, and the assignment continued . . .

Verses on Virtue Versus Vice

Vise

Google Images

Doggerel Verses, That Is . . .

Vice is its own reward,
Which draws me ever toward
That said, if sad, back ward.

Poetry Break: One-Line Poems

Google Images

These one-liners are great fun to play around with:

Free Verse

This poetry gives verse that's free . . . for free!

Cross-Examination

This poem asks where this damned sentence ends!

Biddable

This passive-active verse is not averse.

Paranoimasia

To play with words gives oft a painful pun.

Anyway, I'll keep at them for a while - trying for all that while to avoid that painful-pun punishment of yore . . .

Footloose and Fantasy Free!

Mr. Asghar Bukhari

Daily Mail Online

According to Stephanie Linning, writing for the Daily Mail Online, a British Muslim claims "It's a 'Shoeish conspiracy'"! Oh, why do people always blame the poor downtrodden 'Shoeish folk'? As if the blamers had evidence. Oh, wait, this guy has evidence, namely, a missing shoe:

A British Muslim campaigner faced online ridicule after he claimed 'Zionists' had sneaked into his home and stolen a single shoe.

In a public Facebook post, Asghar Bukhari, a founding member of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK, said someone had tried to intimidate him by taking his footwear as he slept.

He wrote: the 'game was simple - to make me feel vulnerable in my own home', before adding 'it is not the first time I have heard this happening'.

He ended by urging readers to share the message.

Let me get this straight. Some 'Zionist' recently sneaked into Mr. Bukhari's living quarters to steal a single shoe, and Mr. Bukhari says, "[I]t is not the first time I have heard this happening."

Eh? You've heard this happening before? The 'Zionist' is careless enough to awaken you on more than one occasion, yet you LIE in bed and allow him to run off with a single shoe?

Cowardly of you, but we feel your pain, Mr. Bukhari, as you can see here.

Much Upon A Time . . .

Telling Stories
Amazon

Much upon a time, I didn't read the book . . . just a book review. One reader who happened upon my blog once castigated me for discussing a book I hadn't read. I make no apologies for that blog entry. I was discussing the review specifically, not the book directly. I can't be bothered to read every book that gets published!

Let me therefore be clear. I'm reading David Eagleman's NYT review, "The Moral of the Story" (August 3, 2012), of Jonathan Gottschall's book, The Storytelling Animal, not because I enjoy the review all that much or because the book sounds all that good, but just because it says some things about storytelling that I'd like to note:

There are several surprises about stories. The first is that we spend a great deal of time in fictional worlds, whether in daydreams, novels, confabulations or life narratives. When all is tallied up, the decades we spend in the realm of fantasy outstrip the time we spend in the real world. As Gottschall puts it, "Neverland is our evolutionary niche, our special habitat."

A second surprise: The dominant themes of story aren't what we might assume them to be. Consider the plotlines found in children's playtime, daydreams and novels. The narratives can't be explained away as escapism to a more blissful reality. If that were their purpose, they would contain more pleasure. Instead, they're horrorscapes. They bubble with conflict and struggle. The plots are missing all the real-life boring bits, and what remains is an unrealistically dense collection of trouble. Trouble, Gottschall argues, is the universal grammar of stories.

That second point isn't surprising at all, though I am somewhat surprised by the first point. Eagleman doesn't explicitly point to any third or further surprises, but maybe he was surprised by this:

[S]tory's role is "intensely moralistic." Stories serve the biological function of encouraging pro-social behavior. Across cultures, stories instruct a version of the following: If we are honest and play by the social rules, we reap the rewards of the protagonist; if we break the rules, we earn the punishment accorded to the bad guy. The theory is that this urge to produce and consume moralistic stories is hard-wired into us, and this helps bind society together. It's a group-level adaptation. As such, stories are as important as genes. They're not time wasters; they're evolutionary innovations.

I wonder if this is true. Maybe not always:

There are exceptions, Gottschall allows, but they only prove the rule.

I wonder what the exceptions are, and how they 'prove' the rule. Anyway, what do I take from this review?

Trouble . . . is the universal grammar of stories.

I knew that already, but the point is memorably phrased . . . though why "grammar" and not "syntax"? Sure, stories often utter a "What-big-teeth-you-have-grandma" line, but that's merely the moralistic sin tax!

Sorry, but I couldn't resist . . .

'Pun My Word!

Very Punny

Illustration byJeffrey Fisher

(Image from New York Times)

I implied yesterday in my punning poem that puns are harmless, but through extensive reading and the wisdom that comes with age and experience, I have since learned how wrong I was:

King Charles I's court jester, Archy Armstrong, lost his job by saying grace -- "Great praise be given to God and little laud to the Devil" -- at dinner with the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud.

This pun requires that one know that "laud" is Latin for "praise," and the only thing that would enhance the punishment of this anecdote would be if the jester's name were "Archy Archibald," for rather than implying a "ruler strong of arm," his name could be construed as meaning a "ruler shorn of his rule" -- an ironic outcome for the ruling jester, whose 'strong arm' didn't preserve his status, and later for King Charles I, who lost his head to the revolting Protestants, John Milton being a chief 'protester' among them.

I wonder if the unfortunate jester with his ill-timed pun ever got his job back. He appears not to have. His full name, incidentally, was "Archibald Armstrong," which offers several puns but not the one I craved. I have the above, somewhat abridged anecdote from P.J. O'Rourke's article, "The Pun's Story," published in the New York Times (April 15, 2011)

O'Rourke is reviewing John Pollack's book on puns, The Pun also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics, which is quite an expansive title to bear the weight of such an atrocious pun on "sun," but O'Rourke's review makes the book seem to work. He -- whether O'Rourke or Pollack, I don't know -- offers three crucial rules on punning:

"The Rule of Interruption: Although the company may be engaged in a discourse of the most serious consequence, it is and may be lawful to interrupt them with a pun."

"The Rule of Risibility: A man must be the first that laughs at his own pun."

"The Rule of Repetition: You must never let a pun be lost, but repeat and comment upon it, till every one in the company both hears and understands it."

These three are, apparently, gleaned form Thomas Sheridan's 1719 pamphlet, Ars Punica. I have never read Sheridan, but I discovered his rules on my own and have long been making a nuisance of myself by pestering others with my verbal acrobatics.

I suspect that this explains my very laudable standing in the academic world . . .

John Milton: The Word Unbegotten and Begotten in Paradise Lost?

"This greeting on thy impious Crest receive."

Abdiel Attacks Satan, PL 6.188

Gustave Doré

(Image from History of Art)

Several days ago, Dario Rivarossa called my attention to an odd contrast between two passages in Paradise Lost. In Book 5, verses 600-606, God states:

Hear all ye Angels, Progenie of Light, [ 600 ]
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues, Powers,
Hear my Decree, which unrevok't shall stand.
This day I have begot whom I declare
My onely Son, and on this holy Hill
Him have anointed, whom ye now behold [ 605 ]
At my right hand; your Head I him appoint;

[Thomas H. Luxon, ed., The Milton Reading Room, February 2011.]

But in Book 5, verses 833-838, Abdiel maintains:

Thy self though great and glorious dost thou count,
Or all Angelic Nature joind in one,
Equal to him begotten Son, by whom [ 835 ]
As by his Word the mighty Father made
All things, ev'n thee, and all the Spirits of Heav'n
By him created in thir bright degrees,

[Thomas H. Luxon, ed., The Milton Reading Room, February 2011.]

Why is this odd? Because we know from the work of Milton scholars (e.g., Michael Bauman, Milton's Arianism) that Milton held to a quasi-Arian view on the Godhead, namely, that there is no Trinity and that the Son is not co-eternal with the Father but is begotten at some point in time, and that fits quite well with Paradise Lost 5.600-606, where God declares in heaven to His assembled angelic host that he has that very day begotten his Son (i.e., "This day I have begot . . . / My onely Son"), which would appear to put the process by which the Son was begotten some time after the creation of the angels.

That, however, comes into tension with Paradise Lost 5.833-838, where Abdiel reminds Satan that the begotten Son made all things, including the angels (i.e., "by whom / As by his Word the mighty Father made / All things"). The Son surely cannot be begotten twice. That would be like the statement of a janitor at Baylor, when I was an undergrad back in the 1970s, who told us that his father died of pneumonia twice.

But there was a resolution to the janitor's odd statement -- his father died of double pneumonia -- and there might be a resolution to Milton's two statements if we read carefully. The begotten Son was the one "by whom / As by his Word the mighty Father made / All things." This line can be read as distinguishing between two states of the Word of God: a pre-sonship state and a sonship state, differentiated by the event of being begotten. If so, then for Milton, 'divine sonship' is a role taken on by the eternal Word of God in the act of being begotten by God Himself, who (I presume) becomes the Father at that point. This reading of Milton raises the question as to what Milton thought the act of begetting to mean. I haven't looked into that yet, but perhaps Milton thought that the Word was a power of God that became hypostasized through an emanation of God's own substance, but I'm merely guessing.

I suppose that one could try to take the position that Thomas Burgess took in his 1829 book, Milton not the author of the lately-discovered Arian work De Doctrina Christiana (London: Thomas Brettell, 1829), for he calls attention on page 151 to Abdiel's contention in Paradise Lost 5.831-837, i.e., that the Word created all things, as evidence that Milton could not have been Arian in his theology, and therefore asserts that Paradise Lost 5.603-604 (i.e., "This day I have begot whom I declare / My onely Son") "has nothing Arian in it" and merely denotes "a high commission then declared" (page 168), but most scholars today seem to accept the Doctrina Christiana as Milton's work and Milton as some kind of Arian in his theology.

Speaking of Abdiel's words, when he meets Satan on the field of battle and says, "This greeting on thy impious Crest receive" (PL 6.188), and then brings down upon Satan's helmeted head his righteous sword, isn't he using the term "greeting" in a sense so ironic as to be contradictory, in that it contains two meanings that contradict each other, as in some puns?

Does Abdiel thus speak in a postlapsarian, 'fallen' tongue?

R. A. Shoaf on Milton and Puns

R. A. Shoaf on Milton as Poet

(Image from Amazon)

R. A. Shoaf, author of Milton, Poet of Duality: A Study of Semiosis in the Poetry and the Prose, provides some interesting ideas on what it is "about a pun that makes it a figure for the effects of the Fall" in Paradise Lost (page 61). He suggests that "Geoffrey Hartman offers a helpful clue," namely:

You can define a pun as two meanings competing for the same phonemic space or as one sound bringing forth semantic twins, but, however you look at it, it's a crowded situation. Either there is too much sound for the sense or too much sense for the sound.

Shoaf quotes this on page 61, citing Hartman's article "The Voice of the Shuttle" (Beyond Formalism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970, page 347). Shoaf then argues that "[a] pun . . . is a moment of confusion, and confusion is the prime effect of the Fall" (page 61). He quotes Milton's Christian Doctrine: on the meaning of death as punishment for the first sin:

This death consists, first, in the loss or at least the extensive darkening of that right reason, whose function it was to discern the chief good, and which was as it were, the life of the understanding. [CD I.12, YE 6:395] (Shoaf, page 61)

Confusion therefore immediately results after partaking of the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Shoaf has already analyzed this confusion earlier in his article, showing the effect of the Fall upon Adam:

After Eve has sacrificed Adam, "fondly overcome with female charm" (PL 9.999), to her own desire and he has eaten of the fruit, he begins "to dalliance [to] move [her]":

'Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste,
And elegant, of sapience no small part,
Since to each meaning savour we apply,
And palate call judicious.' [PL 9.1016-20]

Much is readied in the word dalliance, of course: we know that what follows will be frivolous, not severe, and we also know that frivolity at this is tasteless. Adam's dalliance is a frivolous pun on sapience, which, however, for all its frivolity from his of view, from ours sounds heavy with the Fall itself -- it is the d(e)-alliance of the Fall (cf. PL 2.819 for the same pun) -- especially if, as readers of Milton, we remember Comus tempting the Lady just before her brothers rescue her: "'Be wise, and taste . . .'" (C 812) -- of course, ifi the Lady tastes (sapio, -ere), she is not wise (sapient). In the word sapience, Adam has confused the sense "taste" and the sense "wisdom" or "judiciousness," to each of which "savour we apply," where the sense "knowledge" (savoir) is replete, beyond Adam's knowing, with the crime he and Eve have just committed. The word sapience is now evidence of the Fall. (Shoaf, Milton, Poet of Duality, pages 60-61)

Shoaf argues that Eve ought to have used her right reason to recognize Satan's puns, distinguish their duality, and resist, but she is deceived by Satan's wordplay, "[a]nd then, convinced by this contradiction in terms, she eats the apple; and with this act, Milton will write, she 'knew not eating death' (PL 9.792), where the four words are syntactically what the pun is semantically -- the confusion of senses (she did not know she was eating death; she did not know [sense: 'connaître'] death who eats [cf. PL 10.597,609]). (Shoaf, Milton, Poet of Duality, page 70)

Thus have we returned to where I left off in my analysis of "knew not eating death." I believe that I can make use of Shoaf's analysis to show how this line in Milton's Paradise Lost incorporates a confusion of languages that parallels the confusion of meanings in puns.

More later . . .

A Resounding Pun in Paradise Lost

Thomas Sprat

"mathematical plainness"

(Image from Wikipedia)

I've just recently read an interesting paper by Paul Sutton, "Puns Lost, Puns Regain'd: The Pun in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain'd," which appears to have been a presentation given at the ANZAMEMS Conference in Adelaide, 7-10 2007, i.e., the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Mr. Sutton was a PhD student at the time and was expecting to finish his thesis later in 2007, though I've not yet discovered if he wrote more on puns in works by John Milton.

But his paper will suffice. Mr. Sutton helpfully points out that "What we term an act of punning would, in actual fact, be one of five rhetorical techniques . . . . Paranomasia, Antanaclasis, Asteismus, Syllepsis, and Polyptoton." By "one of five," he means any of them, not just one. In other words, all five are types of puns . . . though things are a bit more complicated than that, as we shall see. (I'm also now no longer sure that I used "Paronomasia" in a strictly technical sense, though I think that I spelled it correctly, whereas Mr. Sutton appears to have misspelled, or used a variant spelling.)

One problem that punning occasions for language is that with overuse, it "tests the limits of the word . . . to signify meaning." Recognition of this tendency moved some to radical solutions:

The poets and critics of the eighteenth century were well aware of this problem inherent in language. Several times people called for language to be cleaned up and become more mathmatical in nature, most famously, perhaps, by Thomas Sprat in his History of the Royal Society who piped up with a call for a "mathematical plainness" in language. As we are all well aware, theory and practice rarely meet. (Sutton, "Puns Lost, Puns Regain'd," page 2)

What does Milton think about such a mathematical solution? He does have Jesus tell Satan in Paradise Regain'd 1.434-5, "But what have been thy answers, what but dark / Ambiguous and with double sense deluding" (Sutton, page 3). A reader might therefore imagine that Milton favored simplicity and plainness in language, much as Sprat praised in the Royal Society's usage:

They have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can. (Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London, 1667, page 113)

The "naked, natural way" would surely fit the prelapsarian Adam and Eve -- perhaps some of the other characteristics would as well -- and Mr. Sutton notes that "common view of critics, as expressed by Christ in Paradise Regain'd, is that ambiguity is a hallmark of the Satanic style" (Sutton, page 4), so a bit of mathematical plainness might help since Milton believed that "[t]he end . . . of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents" and "that language is . . . the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known" (Of Education).

Milton, however, has the Son use at least one pun, possibly several, as a passage from Mr. Sutton's paper demonstrates:

It is polyptoton that becomes the central pun technique of Milton's new poetic because it is the favoured technique of Christ. Polyptoton, is where a word is repeated but in a different case or inflection. As evidenced here, in book 3 [lines 144-155] of Paradise Lost where we first meet Christ:

O Father, gracious was that word which clos'd
Thy sovran sentence, that Man should find grace;
For which both Heav'n and Earth shall high extoll
Thy praises, with th'innumerable sound
Of Hymns and sacred Songs, wherewith thy Throne
Encompass'd shall resound thee ever blest.
For should Man finally be lost, should Man
Thy creature late so lov'd, thy youngest Son
Fall circumvented thus by fraud, though joynd
With his own folly? that be from thee farr,
That farr be from thee, Father, who art Judg
Of all things made, and judgest onely right.

. . . What I would claim is that polyptoton is a rhetorical technique that works in English but that it only carries the disruption of being a pun in some instances. The changing of 'gracious' to 'grace' and 'judge' to 'judgest' do not stike me as being puns but are instances of polyptoton. 'Sound' to 'resound', is a pun and a polyptoton. What polyptoton allows the poet to do is to utilize the polysemous potential of language by explicitly calling attention to the changing of the word and meaning. Instead of making one word, or one sound, or the repetition of one word carry multiple denotations, polyptoton allows multiple meanings to build up through multiple words. It shows how language is linked, how one sound is linked to another similar sound and how meanings are built up and differentiated. (Sutton, "Puns Lost, Puns Regain'd," pages 7-8)

Mr. Sutton admits of only one pun -- "resound" upon "sound" -- but of several instances of polyptoton, which are at least some sorts of wordplay. Punning and wordplay are thus not intrinsically qualities of fallen language, so long as they're not being used deceptively. All the more interesting, then, the following passage from Mr. Sutton:

Milton attempts to redeem language through Christ and . . . . [move] from a freer, Satanic, play to a more restrained, more focussed, Christ like play, where the ideal is not necessarily for one word one meaning -- that is a pipe dream, as Milton knew and Paradise Lost is a testament to that. Much of the power and sublimity of Paradise Lost comes from Milton's struggle to represent God, Christ, and Paradise through an imperfect, fallen, language. Milton, as I hope I have demonstrated in some small way in this paper, attempted to compensate for the Satanic elements in our fallen language through the use of polyptoton . . . . [and thereby] subdue the logic of the pun" (Sutton, "Puns Lost, Puns Regain'd," page 9).

I think that we can all see a taint of tension here in subduing the logic of the pun even while allowing the Son his one use of a pun in heaven. My point is that the 'fallenness' of language lies not in the polysemous quality of words but in the use of multiple meanings to deceive. I'd thus like to know more about what Mr. Sutton meant by "the Satanic elements in our fallen language."

Knowing that would offer food for thought . . .

Prelapsarian Paronomasia in Paradise Lost

The Librarian, 1566

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

The Spitting Image of Paronomasia

(Image from Wikipedia)

In an article, "Self-Contradicting Puns in Paradise Lost," John Leonard notes the use of wordplay in the unfallen angel Raphael's language:

The War in Heaven -- a civil war -- causes many words to cleave asunder. Here is Raphael on the novelty of hate in heaven:

strange to us it seemed
At first, that angel should with angel war,
And in fierce hosting meet, who wont to meet
So oft in festivals of joy and love
Unanimous,

(VI. 91-5)

'Fierce hosting' is a tautology for the fallen reader, but an oxymoron for Raphael. We readily hear the military sense 'hostile encounter' (OED 'hosting'), but this sense is 'strange' to Raphael, for whom the verb 'host' has hitherto meant 'entertain as a guest' (OED v2 1a) or 'be a guest' (OED v2 2). 'Hosting', for Raphael, implies 'festivals of joy and love', and he hankers after the old meaning even as he steels himself to the new one. There is nothing trivial about this pun, which is based on a real etymological connection. Hostis in Latin can mean either 'enemy' or 'stranger'. Hospes (the root of hospitality) means 'he who entertains a stranger'. (Thomas N. Corns, A Companion to Milton, Wiley-Blackwell, 2003, pages 394-395)

Granted, Raphael is using "hosting" in a double, self-contradicting sense to describe fallen circumstances. The term is, as Leonard notes, an oxymoron for the unfallen angel, who uses the word in its acquired sense of "hostile encounter" even while recalling, and preferring, the word in its original sense of to "entertain [someone] as a guest" or to "be a guest." But this double meaning, this pun by Raphael, cannot be 'fallen' language, for this angel, unlike Satan, is unfallen. And note also the possible wordplay implicit in the original meaning of the term "hosting," in which one can either "be a guest" or "entertain [someone] as a guest," neither of which have even a whiff of fallenness. Punning is thus not a defining characteristic of fallen language in Paradise Lost.

Nevertheless, the Fall -- whether Satan's or humanity's -- does alter language, for it makes many words "cleave asunder" and thereby describe opposites, as Leonard goes on to demonstrate in his article, and such alteration exacerbates the deceptive 'power' of language.

In a certain sense, then, one can talk of 'fallen' language, though the fallenness lies more in its use to deceive than its nature as deceptive.