In this exhilarating and often hilarious book, David Crystal examines why we devote so much time and energy to language games, how professionals make a career of them, and how young children instinctively take to them. Crystal makes a simple argument-that since plating with language is so natural, a natural way to learn language is to play with it-while he discusses puns, crosswords, Iipograms, comic alphabets, rhymes, funny voices taken from dialect and popular culture, limericks, anagrams, scat singing, and much more.

''Word-based play ...is so endemic to cultural progress, so much a part of a child's development, that the extent to which it has been sidelined up to now is almost scandalous...[T] ranscends the traditional 'wacky world of words' compilations. ''-Jonathon Green, The lndependent

''David Crystal's contention is that word-plat y is essential to Human communication, and in support of his arguments he has assembled an entertaining collection of verbal jokes, from witty repartee to groan-worthy gags.”-Charles Osborne, The Sunday Telegraph

 

David Crystal is Honorary Professor of Linguistics the University Wales, Bangor. His previous books include The Cambridge encyclopedia of Language, English as a Global Language, A Dictionary of Linguistics and phonetics, Language Death and Words, words,the last published by the University Chicago press.