The Play's the Thing (at least when it comes to words)

Wordplay. We think of it as light amusement—fun with language, a contest in who can be more clever. A play on words by any other name is a pun, defined by Dictionary.com as "the humorous use of a word or phrase so as to emphasize or suggest its different meanings or applications, or the use of words that are alike or nearly alike in sound but different in meaning..." My puns drive my children crazy (we once spent nearly an hour milking udderly silly cow jokes for all they were worth, going teat for tat until we drove each other mad with cow disease, after which things went sour and they told me I was full of bull and I skulked off, cowed, to chew my cud, thoroughly whipped and put out to pasture), but I take my wordplay the way I take my coffee—seriously (no milk to dilute or sugar to sweeten)—as words are, for me, a rich source of insight, a two-way mirror, if you will, into what I see as the hidden meaning of the universe. When I study homonyms, I come to the conclusion that God (who is the word but whose name cannot be spoken), has a devilishly wicked sense of humor. (Please spare me the ad hominems if you disagree.)

Wow, that was quite an introduction, and a prime example of prologorrhea, a long-winded windup before what I promise will be a pithy pitch, a perambulatory and rambling preamble to the pressing matter at hand.

So...when I wrote my last post, Betwixt and Between, I thought about how the liminal state is an altered state, a state of altering, where change is taking place. Then my mind began to play—alter/altar. Two words that sound the same with different meanings. One means change, the other a place of prayer, sacrifice, sanctification. Totally different, and yet...What happens on the altar? Isn't it a place that changes us? A place where we come to be restored in faith, united in matrimony, or given to God as we depart this life? Just as I do not believe in random coincidence, preferring to think of magical encounters as scripted synchronicities—written in a book beyond our human comprehension—I do not believe in accidents of language. I perceive it all as purposeful—a playground in which our purpose is to divine meaning. As God teases us with words that play two different notes yet strike a single sound, it is up to us to tease out the message—a revelation that pulls back another inch of the curtain, further illuminating the grand design.

The more you look at words this way, the more wisdom you find. Examining the phrase double entendre, which we use to describe a word or phrase with two meanings, we learn that the word entendre, now entente in French, derives from the Latin verb intendere, which meant to turn one's attention to or, in effect, strain to see or hear. The message, at least to me, is clear. We are charged with making the effort, with straining to hear the hidden (in plain sight, if we look), complementary meanings of words.