Definition and Examples of Word Play in English

Word play is verbal wit: the manipulation of language (in particular, the sounds and meanings of words) with the intent to amuse. Also known as logology and verbal play. Most young children take great pleasure in word play, which T. Grainger and K. Goouch characterize as a subversive activity . . . through which children experience the emotional charge and power of their own words to overturn the status quo and to explore boundaries (Young Children and Playful Language in Teaching Young Children, 1999) Examples and Observations of Word Play AntanaclasisYour argument is sound, nothing but sound.  - playing on the dual meaning of sound as a noun signifying something audible and as an adjective meaning logical or well-reasoned.(Benjamin Franklin)Double EntendreI used to be Snow White, but I drifted.  - playing on drift being a verb of motion as well as a noun denoting a snowbank.(Mae West)MalaphorSenator McCain suggests that somehow, you know, Im green behind the ears.  - mixing two metaphors: wet behind the ears and green, both of which signify inexperience.(Senator Barack Obama, Oct. 2008)MalapropismWhy not? Play captains against each other, create a little dysentery in the ranks.  - using dysentery instead of the similar-sounding dissent to comic effect.(Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos)Paronomasia and PunsHanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.  - riffing on the similarity of quoted to quartered as in drawn and quartered.(Fred Allen)Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.(credited to Tom Waits)Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job.(James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)I have a sin of fear, that when I have spunMy last thread, I shall perish on the shore;But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy SonShall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;And having done that, Thou hast done;I fear no more.(John Donne, A Hymn to God the Father)Snigletpupkus, the moist residue left on a window after a dog presses its nose to it. - a made-up word that sounds like pup kiss, since no actual word for this exists.SyllepsisWhen I address Fred I never have to raise either my voice or my hopes.  - a figure of speech in which a single  word is applied to two others in two different senses (here, raising ones voice and raising ones hopes).(E.B. White, Dog Training)Tongue TwistersChester chooses chestnuts, cheddar cheese with chewy chives. He chews them and he chooses them. He chooses them and he chews them. . . . those chestnuts, cheddar cheese and chives in cheery, charming chunks.  - repetition of the ch sound.(Singing in the Rain, 1952) Language Use as a Form of Play Jokes and witty remarks (including puns and figurative language) are obvious instances of word-play in which most of us routinely engage. But it is also possible to regard a large part of all language use as a form of play. Much of the time speech and writing are not primarily concerned with the instrumental conveying of information at all, but with the social interplay embodied in the activity itself. In fact, in a narrowly instrumental, purely informational sense most language use is no use at all. Moreover, we are all regularly exposed to a barrage of more or less overtly playful language, often accompanied by no less playful images and music. Hence the perennial attraction (and distraction) of everything from advertising and pop songs to newspapers, panel games, quizzes, comedy shows, crosswords, Scrabble and graffiti.(Rob Pope, The English Studies Book: An Introduction to Language, Literature and Culture, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2002) Word Play in the Classroom We believe the evidence base supports using word play in the classroom. Our belief relates to these four research-grounded statements about word play: - Word play is motivating and an important component of the word-rich classroom.- Word play calls on students to reflect metacognitively on words, word parts, and context.- Word play requires students to be active learners and capitalizes on possibilities for the social construction of meaning.- Word play develops domains of word meaning and relatedness as it engages students in practice and rehearsal of words. (Camille L. Z. Blachowicz and Peter Fisher, Keeping the Fun in Fundamental: Encouraging Word Awareness and Incidental Word Learning in the Classroom Through Word Play. Vocabulary Instruction: Research to Practice, ed. by James F. Baumann and Edward J. Kameenui. Guilford, 2004) Shakespeares Word Play Wordplay was a game the Elizabethans played seriously. Shakespeares first audience would have found a noble climax in the conclusion of Mark Antonys lament over Caesar: O World! thou wast the Forrest to this HartAnd this indeed, O World, the Hart of thee, just as they would have relished the earnest pun of Hamlets reproach to Gertrude: Could you on this faire Mountaine leave to feed,And batten on this Moore? To Elizabethan ways of thinking, there was plenty of authority for these eloquent devices. It was to be found in Scripture (Tu es Petrus . . .) and in the whole line of rhetoricians, from Aristotle and Quintilian, through the neo-classical textbooks that Shakespeare read perforce at school, to the English writers such as Puttenham whom he read later for his own advantage as a poet.(M. M. Mahood, Shakespeares Wordplay. Routledge, 1968) Found Word-Play A few years ago I was sitting at a battered desk in my room in the funky old wing of the Pioneer Inn, Lahaina, Maui, when I discovered the following rhapsody scratched with ballpoint pen into the soft wooden bottom of the desk drawer. SaxaphoneSaxiphoneSaxophoneSaxyphoneSaxephoneSaxafone Obviously, some unknown traveler--drunk, stoned, or simply Spell-Check deprived--had been penning a postcard or letter when he or she ran headlong into Dr. Saxs marvelous instrument. I have no idea how the problem was resolved, but the confused attempt struck me as a little poem, an ode to the challenges of our written language.(Tom Robbins, Send Us a Souvenir From the Road. Wild Ducks Flying Backward, Bantam, 2005) Alternate Spellings: wordplay, word-play

Essay about Life of John Adams, Second President of the...

John Adams John Adams was a great proponent of the no taxation without representation proclamation. He was a devout Christian and delved into his life with the Holy Spirit. God had a great duty for John in the history and development of America. John Adams was born on October 30, 1735 in Quincy, Massachusetts. His father’s name was John Adams as well, his profession was to deal with political matters in the town, and also to serve in the militia. John Adams’s mothers name was Susanna Boylston Adams. Susanna’s priorities were to focus and to base her family upon Christ’s truth, and to be devoted to her family. John had been provided a swell education through all of his years of school. When he graduated grade school in 1746, he went to†¦show more content†¦There were many protests to follow that which Abigail supported him on. John celebrated with the Bostonians when they poured the tea into the Boston Harbor, and was ready at any time to speak for liberty. John became a delegate of the First Continental Congress and second continental congress in 1774.The passing three years John strongly encouraged the congress to make a decision to separate the colonies from England. He helped draft a document that would state America independent and would defend the Declaration of Independence on May 10, 1776. John was on a committee that drafted the declaration of independence, in this he met many people who fought for the same freedoms and liberty. John was the first vice president of the United States serving under General George Washington. After that John was elected the position of being the 2nd President of the United States of America in 1796. In this position Adams prevented war between France and America by signing a treaty with Napoleon Bonaparte in 1800. The treaty by which he drafted was the ending of the Revolutionary War in 1783. John also made and signed the Alien and Sedition act, which was a set of unpopular laws that stated that everyone would a freedom of speech. Adams had ideas of America pushing off Canada from their shores, he also had an interest in America extending west. While trying to make the treaty work with the French, John and his son John Quincy toured Europe where they hired their firstShow MoreRelatedJohn Adams Essays1414 Words   |  6 PagesAs the second president of the United States and the first vice president, John Adams had experienced various kinds of lives of different social positions. Adams, in his early years, tried diverse professions like writer, lawyer, public speaker, and congressman. Later, he became one of the leaders of several political fields, such as the American Revoluti on and foreign relationships, whose contributions had influenced the United States Constitution. People and nations are forged in the firesRead MoreBiography of John Quincy Adams709 Words   |  3 Pages Did you know that John Quincy Adams is the most fit president because he walked three miles every day ? These facts are really interesting! To learn about John Quincy Adams. During his childhood these are some important events that happened. A little boy was born on July 11, 1767 in Braintree, Massachusetts. This little boy’s name is John Quincy Adams. When John was 10, he went with his father to France on a mission and acted as his father’s secretary. Also, from a hilltop near the family farmRead More John Quincy Adams Essay1564 Words   |  7 PagesJohn Quincy Adams John Quincy Adams was the only son of a president to become president. He had an impressive political background that began at the age of fourteen. He was an intelligent and industrious individual. He was a man of strong character and high principles. 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Mandatory HIV/AIDS testing for Pregnant Woman Free Essays

string(295) " carried out on the newborn will always turn out to be positive, for the simple reason that the baby has would have inherited the HIV antibodies of its mother automatically during the birth and delivery processes, and this cannot be taken to mean that the newborn is infected with AIDS and HIV\." Today, anti retroviral therapies are being developed by several manufacturers, in a bid to finally be able to reduce the number of instances of the transmission of HIV from mother to child. The drug AZT, for example, has been successful at bringing the rate of such direct transmissions down, and this has given rise to a widespread feeling that if testing of pregnant women for the presence of the dreaded AIDS virus were to be made mandatory, then perhaps many lives could be saved. It must be remembered that before the year 1994, when AIDS became renowned for its impact on the human body, not much was known about the disease, often referred to as ‘the scourge of modern man’, and nothing at all was known about the transmission of this disease from a mother to her unborn child. We will write a custom essay sample on Mandatory HIV/AIDS testing for Pregnant Woman or any similar topic only for you Order Now It was in late 1994 that an American clinical trial known as ‘ACTG 076’ was able to prove the assumption that when a drug AZT was administered to a HIV positive pregnant woman, and also to her child immediately after its birth, it was able to lower the rate of transmission from a high of 25 % to a low of 8 %. The trial was based on the fact that the pregnant woman had to be given the drug during her pregnancy, during her labor, during her delivery, and for the newborn baby during his first six weeks of life. Immediately after the results of this trial were published, the US Public Health Service recommended that all HIV positive pregnant women must be given the drug, especially to those women who demonstrated a likelihood of developing the disease. This was to include women who had never taken drugs of any kind against HIV AIDS. The administration of the drug, of course, involved an invasion of the woman’s basic privacy, and this was something that created a stir at the time. Such invasion of privacy was not to be tolerated.   (Yovetich) As stated earlier, making HIV testing mandatory for a pregnant woman, in the hope that the woman’s unborn child could be given a better and more productive and disease free life was not as simple an issue as it may have sounded at the time. There was much opposition from several different quarters. The main reason for the opposition was that the woman’s private life would be exposed, as HIV was a disease that was clothed in much secrecy, and it still is today. Defenders of privacy of a human being fought a long war to oppose mandatory testing of all pregnant women for the dreaded AIDS/HIV virus. To test a woman against her will, and then inform her that she had AIDS, and that she must take the drug so that her unborn child would not develop the disease would be a rather intrusive method to follow, felt privacy defenders, even if such testing meant that the risk of transmission to others would be reduced, and many lives could be saved in the future. However, the several advances in science through the years until today have prompted many individuals to reconsider the issue today. Several people ask themselves today, are the potential benefits of mandatory testing for AIDS/HIV in some contexts outweighing the privacy interests? Or, on the other hand, is such an invasion of privacy completely justified if the unborn child could be saved from a life of disease and eventual death? It must be noted that several experiments and trials have been able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that when a pregnant woman is tested for AIDS, and it is found that she is HIV positive, and she is then offered the drug that would combat the transmission of the disease to her unborn child, and she takes up the offer, then the chances of the unborn fetus being born with full blown AIDS would be reduced dramatically. Statistics have revealed that such therapy would successful bring down the rate of transmission from a high of a one on four chance, to a one in fifty chance. Such evidence has prompted a rash of proposals on the part of the governments to make the testing of HIV/AIDS mandatory for a pregnant woman. To date, it must be noted that only the legislatures of New York and Connecticut have been able to sanction mandatory programs that would impose HIV tests on a pregnant woman, without her consent, wherein she would be able to turn down the ‘offer of testing’ put forth to her. Although it may be true that at first glance, one would not be able to understand why anyone would wish to turn down an offer to save their unborn child, it is indeed a fact that science today has not yet advanced so far as to absolutely guarantee that the young pregnant woman would not pass on the disease to her child, like for example, statistics are able to prove that even if a pregnant woman has no medication at all for her AIDS, she still has only a one in four chance of transmitting the virus to her unborn child. This is because of the simple fact that a mother transmits the disease to her child during the process of delivery, which is the time when the infant would be exposed to the blood of his mother, without the protection of the umbilical cord that has connected him to his mother all the nine months. In other words, statistics prove that intra-uterine transmission, that is, transference of the virus before delivery, of AIDS to the unborn infant is quite rare, and it does not take place in one out of four cases. AIDS and HIV can also be transmitted to the child after its birth, through breast feeding. Furthermore, it is important to remember that when an infant is born to an HIV-positive mother, HIV-antibody tests carried out on the newborn will always turn out to be positive, for the simple reason that the baby has would have inherited the HIV antibodies of its mother automatically during the birth and delivery processes, and this cannot be taken to mean that the newborn is infected with AIDS and HIV. You read "Mandatory HIV/AIDS testing for Pregnant Woman" in category "Essay examples" In these cases, the antibodies that the baby has inherited would stay in his body for the first few months of his life, after which it would be replaced with his own. If the HIV testing is done on the infant at this stage, it would reveal the actual status of the child, rather than if it were to be done immediately after birth, which would often mislead the persons involved.     (The ACLU on HIV testing of pregnant women and newborns 2001) It is a sad fact indeed that the data on AIDS in America and in Canada indicated that almost 766 out of 824 pregnant and HIV infected women from twenty five states of the United States of America were aware of their HIV status much before their deliveries, yet there are about 280 to 370 peri-natal HIV transmissions in the country, every year. Researchers and scientists state repeatedly that the only way in which to control this dismal state of affairs would be to make HIV/AIDS testing mandatory for pregnant woman, despite opposition from several quarters. In Canada, for example, three different HIV testing approaches have been assayed, and medical records and relevant data have shown without doubt that the so called ‘opt-in’ or voluntary testing approach, in which a pregnant woman is offered pre-HIV test counseling, and must give her consent voluntarily to an HIV test is generally related with lower testing rates than the ‘opt-out’ voluntary testing approach, in which the woman, who has had HIV/AIDS counseling, may choose to refuse HIV testing. As a matter of fact, even the mandatory newborn HIV testing approach proved to be ineffective, and the testing rates were much lower than expected, although they were better than the ‘opt-in’ testing method. (HIV testing among pregnant women, United States and Canada 1998 to 2001 2002) Today, with the governments across the world, especially in developed countries responding to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, women seem to be at the center of all the attention, and increasingly, global efforts at AIDS prevention seem to center on women, especially pregnant women who may transmit the dreaded AIDS virus to their unborn child, either before or after delivery. Most governments are taking advantage of the fact that medicines and drugs are available today, which would be able to effectively block the transmission of the virus to an infant, and these governments are using the drugs to make sure that the AIDS virus would not spread far and wide. One such government initiative is the ‘PMTCT Program’, or the ‘Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission Program’. It must be stated here that although the benefits of this and other similar programs may be tremendous, it is very important that the government takes into consideration the experiences of a pregnant woman who lives with AIDS, and the trauma that she undergoes as a direct result. The government must also learn to adopt a human rights perspective when it deals with a pregnant woman, and issues that concern her privacy. As a matter of fact, several governments seem to have forgotten, state human rights personnel, about the woman with AIDS, so keen are they on the prevention of the transmission of AIDS to the unborn child. Herein lies the crux of the issue: if the woman were to be treated as a patient, who is suffering from a dreaded and fatal disease, who needs treatment for the disease, and who has human rights as an individual, then it would be infinitely easier to deal with the issue. In other words, if the governments were to respect the woman who is harboring the AIDS virus, and treat her with basic human dignity and respect, it would ensure that her unborn child who is the future citizen of the country, and the future of his family would be better served. When this is taken in light of the fact that women are three times as likely as men to develop HIV/AIDS, and that a woman is physiologically more susceptible than a man to developing the infection through vaginal intercourse, it would seem that according a woman the deference that she deserves would be the best approach to the problem. In certain under developed countries, women have been reported to say that when they were diagnosed with AIDS, they were asked to abort their unborn fetuses, as they supposedly ‘had no right to pass on the infection to their unborn baby’.   In such cases, it is evident that the feelings and the rights of the woman were not considered in any way, and this is by no means uncommon. Although PMTCT Programs have today gained in popularity, and it is being touted across the world as being the one surefire method to control AIDS, these programs do implicate a certain invasion of the privacy and dignity of the woman concerned, especially in countries where the woman is denied the right to give informed consent to HIV/AIDS testing and treatment, probably because of a lack of education, and she is also denied her right to confidentiality. When this is taken in context of the stigma associated with AIDS in several countries, it is obvious that the program must be refined and restated, if it were to be a success.   (Pregnant woman living with HIV n.d) To conclude, it must be said that although mandatory testing for HIV/AIDS may be an excellent idea and that it would help prevent the transmission of the virus to a woman’s unborn child, the program must be implemented while keeping in mind the human rights, the right to confidentiality, and the basic human rights of the woman suffering form the disease. If this were to be done, then one can look forward to a world in which the awful HIV/AIDS virus would be eliminated, and the world would be a safe place once more. Works cited Yovetich, Tasha â€Å"Making it mandatory, should HIV tests be required for pregnant women?† The Canadian Women’s Health Network (1999) 13 December 2007 http://www.cwhn.ca/network-reseau/2-1/hiv.html â€Å"The ACLU on HIV testing of pregnant women and newborns† HIV testing of pregnant women and newborns (2001) 13 December 2007 http://www.aclu.org/hiv/testing/11535pub20010101.html â€Å"HIV testing among pregnant women, United States and Canada 1998 to 2001† MMWR Weekly (2002) 13 December 2007 http://www.cdc.gov/mmwR/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5145a1.htm â€Å"Pregnant woman living with HIV† Reproductive Right.org 13 December 2007 (n.d) http://209.85.175.104/search?q=cache:nY2ZbVW-hQoJ:www.reproductiverights.org/pdf/pub_bp_HIV.pdf+Mandatory+HIV/AIDS+testing+for+Pregnant+Womanhl=enct=clnkcd=4gl=in How to cite Mandatory HIV/AIDS testing for Pregnant Woman, Essay examples