The best toy ever

Donna Leon

In her book Wandering through Life, Donna Leon recalls the first time her mother read to her the rhyme that has delighted all of us:

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear./Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair./Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy,/Wuzzy?

She writes, "And I still remember the bolt of delight I felt as I grasped this miraculous truth: a word could have two separate meanings. Suddenly language was revealed to me as the best toy ever."

Peter Farb makes a similar point in his book Word Play. People in every culture play word games, he says. They have fun with riddles, outrageous insults. jokes having to do with confusing words and so on. Most of the humor in episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the most popular situation comedies of its day, had to do with the Clampetts and others engaging in conversations in which each party thought they were both talking about the same thing when, as only the audience knew, they were actually talking about very different things.

Most one-liners told by comics have to do with word play. "Take my wife ... please," Henny Youngman said. The line got a laugh because you thought he was using his wife as an example, and then with one word he suddenly gave his words a literal meaning.

Yet language need not be funny to be "the best toy ever." Writers enjoy what they do because of the pleasure words give them when they are shaped into sentences that express meaning, that reveal beauty, that give amazingly accurate descriptions, that produce emotions, that encourage others to change their opinions or to take action.

I was 14 when I suddenly discovered one day that writing was fun. Words had become, thanks to a blue portable typewriter, the best toy ever. Now in my 80s, I still play every day.