ABOUT THIS BOOK

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 playing with language is so natural, a natural way to learn language is to play with it-while he discusses puns, crosswords, lipograms, comic alphabets, rhymes, funny voices taken from dialect and popular culture, limericks, anagrams, scat singing, and much more.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

David Crystal is the Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of 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 on Words, the last published by the University of Chicago Press.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Games People Play
Acknowledgments
1. THE LUDIC VIEW
2. THE AMATEURS
Introduction
Enjoying the Joke
Dialect Humour
Funny Sounds and Voices
Nonce Words and Meanings
Sounds and Spellings
Limerick Land
Even Total Nonsense
3. THE ENTHUSIASTS
Introduction
The Language Enthusiast
Missions Impossible
The Ludic Tower of Babel
Building Higher Towers
Gematria, and its Legacy
Grid Games
And Finally...
4. THE PROFESSIONALS
Introduction
The Advertisers
The Headline Writers
The Comedians
The Collectors
The Comic Writers
The Authors
The Artists
The Theologians
5. THE CHILDREN
Introduction
The First Year
Growing Up
The Language of the Playground
Towards Education
The Logical Conclusion
6. THE READERS
Introduction
The Ludic Gap
The Missing Play
From Creativity to Intervention
Other Domains?
A New Climate?
7. THE FUTURE
Introduction
Why Play?
The Final Step
Notes
Index

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