Playing with language

Although it was published in 1973 and has become outdated in many ways, Peter Farb's Word Play remains an important book on the subject of "what happens when people talk," his subtitle.

Farb covers numerous aspects of spoken language — why learning languages is easy for children but difficult for adults, criminal slang, playing the dozens (word play common in black communities where the object is to insult one another's mother in amusing ways), lying, jargon, translation from one language to another, baby talk, artificial languages and on and on.

Playing with language is common in most cultures, he tells us. Just as American blacks play the dozens, in many cultures the ability to quickly come up with clever lines, sometimes in rhyme, can be a test of belonging or even of manhood. Hierarchy can sometimes be determined with speech rather than fists. He uses Marx Brothers movies as a prime example of first-rate word play in the United States.

Farb concludes that all human languages are alike in many respects. Yet they can sometimes be very different. In English, for example, we think of the future as being ahead of us, the past behind us. In the Quechua language of Peru, however, it is the past that lies ahead. A Quechua speaker "logically states that past events can be seen in the mind since they already happened, and therefore they must be in front of his eyes. But since he cannot 'see' into the future, these events must therefore be out of sight or 'behind' him."

It is differences like this can make translation so difficult. One place where his book seems dated is when he writes that using a computer to translate one language into another is impossible. Today many people have apps on their phones that can perform at least basic translation of major languages.