![]() Idioms are popular, culturally understood phrases that generally have a figurative meaning. For example, if you said “The baker has great buns,” it could be understood in two ways! e. Naturally, double entendres rely on wordplay for their success, because the words used have a literal and a figurative meaning. Double Entendreĭouble entendre is the double interpretation of a word or phrase, with the secondary meaning usually being funny or risqué. These techniques can create some very catchy and interesting wordplay.Īssonance creates a rhyming effect, for example, “the fool called a duel with a mule.” Consonance has a pleasing sound, for example, “the shells she shucks are delicious.” d. Assonance and ConsonanceĪssonance is the matching of vowel sounds in language, while consonance is the matching of consonant sounds. For example, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” c. ![]() You’re probably pretty familiar with this device, as it is a distinguishing feature of many nursery rhymes and tongue twisters. AlliterationĪlliteration is a technique expressed by repeating the same first consonant sound in a series of words. We use acronyms for all kinds of things, though-for example, the recent news about Great Britain’s exit from the European Union has come to be referred to as “Brexit,” combining parts of the words “Britain” and “Exit.” b. The use of acronyms is increasingly common in our culture today-both formal and informal-and has risen in popularity over the past decade as texting has become commonplace (think of BRB and TTYL!). AcronymĪcronyms are abbreviations of terms formed by using parts or letters of the original words, like saying “froyo” instead of frozen yogurt or “USA” for United States of America. However, this represents only a small selection in truth, the actual list includes hundreds of techniques! a. Here we will outline some primary wordplay techniques. This joke relies on two meanings of the word “dressing” for its humor-one for “dressing” as in putting on clothes, and one for mayonnaise being a type of salad “dressing.” Q: What did the mayonnaise say when the girl opened the refrigerator? Here, when spoken aloud, “I love ewe” sounds like “I love you.” But, the word “ewe” is the term for a female sheep. Puns are some of the most frequently used forms of wordplay. Here are some simple jokes that use wordplay for their humor: ![]() Using wordplay techniques relies on several different aspects of rhetoric, like spelling, phonetics (sound and pronunciation of words), and semantics (meaning of words). It involves using literary devices and techniques like consonance, assonance, spelling, alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhyme, acronym, pun, and slang (to name a few) to form amusing and often humorous written and oral expressions. Those are the words we are most interested in today.Wordplay (or word play, and also called play-on-words) is the clever and witty use of words and meaning. ![]() ![]() Words that make you wonder why anyone would ever come up with them. How confusing is that? And then there are the funny words. How about die? It could mean death or it could mean one half of a pair of dice! And how about words that sound the same but mean very different things? Like plane and plain for example? Obviously, plane is another word for airplane, while plain could mean an area of land that is flat, or it could mean something that is simple or not elaborate. After all, how many words do we have in the English language that mean the same thing? For example, we have car, automobile, and motor vehicle. Although English may be the language that most people outside of English-speaking countries want to learn, the going may be tough because English can be a bit nonsensical for those who did not learn it at an early age. The English language can be a real head-scratcher for people to learn if it is not their native tongue. ![]()
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