The ludic impulses of science writers
I've noted before that in certain domains writers are inclined towards
all kinds of playing with language: in advertising, headlines for
feature stories, and titles of porn flicks (mentioned
here),
and also generally in science writing for a popular audience (mentioned
here),
among other places. In those postings from last October, I
focused on playful variations on formulaic language, but formulaic
language often appears "straight" (though in such a way as to call
attention to itself), and there's a lot of phonological playfulness --
rhyme, alliteration, assonance, transposition, etc.
In the April 2006
Scientific American,
an article by George Musser starts out (on p. 18) with a bang: a
self-conscious bit of formulaic language in the head, and then a
wonderful phonological transposition in the second sentence (which is
followed by a pretty good metaphor).
The head:
The Check Is in the Mail
This is a kind of quotation, of one of three Dubious Reassurances in a
joke. (In the version I know best, it's the only one that's not
sexual in content. Instead, it's about money.) As the
subhead makes clear, the story is about sending money, though not by
checks in the mail (so the quotation calls attention to itself):
Does the money migrants send home do
any good?
On to the text:
If there is any political issue that
could use a dose of scientific rigor, it is migration. U.S.
immigration policy is widely regarded as a total mess, the European
melting pot produces pelting mobs, and all over the world tall fences
have been constructed to keep facts from entering the debate.
As a sometime student of speech errors, I really appreciated the
Spooneristic "melting pot... pelting mobs". As a sometime student
of imperfect rhymes and imperfect puns, I appreciated the phonological
transposition even more: not the simple "melting pot... pelting Mott
(/mat/)" (which would of course make no sense in this context), but the
imperfect transposition in "mobs" /mabz/. Cute.
Then comes the reference to tall fences being erected, which at first
we're likely to take to be about the literal tall fences going up along
various borders -- surely they're being alluded to -- but then turns
out to be (metaphorically) about barriers excluding information.
Well, the whole performance gave me a moment of pleasure. Maybe
I'm just easily entertained.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 28, 2006 02:34 PM