Tag archives: wordplay

You’ve probably heard the joke about the marriage broker who’s been telling his client all the attractive features of a prospective bride, but then adds, “There’s one more thing I’ve got to tell you: She’s just a little bit pregnant.” In at least this one respect, being “OK” is like being pregnant. You can’t be […]

Perhaps you have come across this recommended method for making a sculpture of an elephant: You just get a big block of rock, and chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. More poetically, some great sculptor is said to have explained that the image he wished to create was already sleeping there inside […]

Most people would agree that courage is an admirable quality. The word came originally from the Latin word for “heart” – as in Richard, Coeur de Lion, or “Richard, the Lion-heart.” Dan Rather, once a leading TV news “anchor-man,” used to sign off with that single word, “Courage!” (His predecessor and mentor, Walter Cronkite, would […]

From those marooned by Shakespeare’s Tempest to Coleridge’s becalmed “Ancient Mariner” (“as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”) to the imperiled baby rocking in the tree-top, to the tornado which blew Dorothy from Kansas to Oz – the wind, or lack of it, has wound its way through our culture in any […]

Most people have probably forgotten why we call psychiatrists “shrinks.” (I had a friend who used to call them “trick-cyclists.”) But the term “shrink” is really a contraction of “head-shrinker,” and comes from the notion that, dealing with our heads as they do, they are like the natives of primitive tribes, who used to shrink […]

Isn’t it remarkable that the vast majority of all the games we play involving physical activity are focused upon an object, usually round, which we call a “ball.” It can be small as a marble, or large as a bowling ball, light as a ping-pong ball, or heavy as a “medicine ball,” a sphere, as […]

In England it is, or used to be, a big event to turn 21. At my 21st birthday party I made place-cards with verses for each of the guests, who represented different eras in my young life. One was for a fellow-student at University College, London, where we were undergraduates, studying for what was called […]

Food has no educational value, no sex appeal, no ethical significance, and very little connection with underwear. Like us, it just sits there, waiting to be consumed by something greater than itself. The Great Alimentary Canal is part of the Universal Chain of Being, Nature’s Grand Design for recycling everything. But what would Food be […]

As far as I know, there is no legal penalty for forgetting. That is why “I just can’t remember” is so frequently adduced during testimony in court. It is the perfect excuse. The beauty of it is that there is no reliable way of proving whether you remember or not. “Lest We Forget” is a […]

One of my favorite proverbs says, “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.” I take this to mean that, if you’re in an unfortunate position (like the poor lamb who’s just had his protective fleece removed), the chances are that things will now get a little better for you, rather than worse (so the […]

One of the questions children are most commonly asked is, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It was once mainly boys who were asked, because all good little girls, people assumed, would naturally want to be wives and mothers. Being a shy little boy, I myself didn’t often get asked, but […]

When Robert Frost wrote, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” he was thinking of the difficulty of maintaining barriers. Nature builds much more successful ones, in the form of mountain ranges, oceans, and deserts, which need very little maintenance. Nevertheless, humanity sees every barrier as a challenge. Still, we need borders, to separate […]

I’m sure you’ve come across the expression, “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” It makes a lot of sense. It sums up the whole idea of neatness and order. You can’t put things away properly, if you don’t know where they go. And you can’t find anything very easily, unless you know […]

I’m sure you’ve come across the expression, “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” It makes a lot of sense. It sums up the whole idea of neatness and order. You can’t put things away properly, if you don’t know where they go. And you can’t find anything very easily, unless you know […]

My closest experience to living a dream come true was being hired to teach on board a cruise ship converted into a “floating university,” and sailing with it twice around the world. I had long fantasized that, one day, travel and education would be combined in ways like this – but to become part of […]

We fall in love. So why don’t we fall in hate? But we all know that “falling” is much more complicated than that. There is, for instance, a big difference between a “fallen soldier,” and a “fallen woman.” Slipping and Falling too is acknowledged to be a major cause of death and injury, especially among […]

I am thinking of founding a religion in which everything is permitted. It would be the First Church of Anything Goes, and its followers would be known as Any’s. Wouldn’t it be great to have perfect freedom, sanctioned by the Almighty! But I must admit that this idea, attractive as it may seem at first […]

You probably know that the last four months of our calendar are wrongly named. “Sept,” “Oct,” “Nov,” and “Dec,” mean, in Latin, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th, whereas those months are actually our ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. How did this happen? – and, even more to the point, why, for two thousand years, has […]