My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

v.2, #4, August, 1995

WORD CHILD

I need to warn you about me and words. I love them. I love the sound of them, the feel of them rolling around on my tongue. I love the games you can play with them, the puns, the rhymes (especially two and three syllable ones), the alliteration.

I came by it honestly. I was the fourth child of a man who worked full-time in Michigan but saw no reason why that should keep him from running a business in New Jersey as well. We spent a LOT of time on the road, and the way our parents kept four kids from killing each other was to keep us busy with word games.

We played the alphabet game more times than I can count. To this day, I cherish a fondness for Quaker State Motor Oil, because if you found one of their billboards at the critical moment, you got Q,R,S,T, and U at one go. (We were NOT in sympathy with Lady Bird Johnson's plan to take down the billboards to beautify the highways.)

We played license plate games; you know, whatever the string of letters in a license plate, think of a word with those letters in that order, like:
RYH....rhythm
FHY....fishy
FZN....frozen

Of course this was easy to do, thanks to the fact that in its formative years, English was in the hands of people who couldn't spell.

In the seventies, when we first started hearing about Muslim terrorists, my grownup mind was appropriately horrified. My interior 8-year old, however, was saying, "JHD....jihad! What a neat word!"

Our weekly migrations were before the interstate highways came along.. We had two-lane traffic, with Burma Shave signs facing each lane. For those of you born too late to know what I'm talking about, these were brief verses spread over four or five signs, ending with the advertising pitch, as in
Around the curve
Lickety split
Beautiful car
Wasn't it?
Buy Burma Shave!

The child on the right was assigned to read aloud the forward Burma Shave signs. But the older child on the left had the awesome responsibility of reading the backward Burma Shave signs, sticking them into short-term memory, reconstructing them, and reciting them in the correct order.

My brother would read to us from Pogo, whose remarkable renderings of English included the immortal "We have met the enemy and he is us." Thanks to Pogo, I truly thought that one Christmas carol went "Deck the halls with Boston Charlie, Walla Walla, Wash. and Kalamazoo." Seemed reasonable enough to me.

My sister would sing us the songs of Tom Lehrer, which I committed to memory, and which clearly warped my world view, like:

"My heart will be quickenin'

With each drop of strychnine

We feed to a pigeon

(It just takes a smidgeon)

To poison a pigeon in the park.

We read Dr. Seuss and the Oz books. One of the greatest pleasures in raising a son was reading these aloud to him. I had forgotten how funny and filled with wordplay the Oz books were, with its strange creatures like the long snake made out of alphabet blocks which was, of course, the ABC serpent.

I love intelligent puns, intended or otherwise. The goofs made by type- setters never fail to amuse me, like:

Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim

Chester Morrill, 62, Was Fed Secretary

and of course my favorite piece of inadvertent truth,

"Mrs. Adams was suddenly taken seriously in her home today."

I love writers who use words well, especially the funny ones. Some of the people I love most are people I have never met, but I know their minds through their columns or books: Dave Barry, Douglas Adams, John Ciardi, Dorothy Parker, Molly Ivins, Miss Manners, and all the people who enter the New York Magazine competition every week.

Even if I won't ever be in their class, you will know I'm aiming high.

My Word's Worth Archive

Current column

Marylaine.com/ home to all my other writing

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.