Why are puns used so often as titles for books and articles? Even if I don't fully understand the reference being made or it doesn't really make sense, I still get a fairly consistent though vague feeling from this kind of wordplay, as if I'm already being prepared to believe what I'm about to read. Why should a pun generate preemptive credibility?
When I'm trying to condense the whiff of meaning around language into something more solid, I often play a game that Emily and I used to play as junior planners. We would replace all the words in an ad with nonsense syllables and read them out loud to hear just the tone, and often it's the tone that holds all the meaning. The words are just blank carrier waves. Here's a common tone structure for a conventional print ad in which you can hear the headline, body copy and tagline:
When I play the tone of a title pun like "Animal Pharm", the NYT magazine exposé of "pill-popping pets", I hear the "Law and Order" chapter title sound. The show's producers call it the "doink-doink", a seriously underpowered name for that heavy metal duo of syncopated thumps. I think of it as the sound of god's stapler, whacking up pieces of paper on the cosmic bulletin board. Eventually, the pieces will form a recognizable shape, a story, but right now you can't see it. And in the end, you may not like what the story says about the world and your fellow man. But the stapler doesn't care about how you'd like things to be. All you know is that the things you're about to see are undeniably true pieces of a puzzle, recorded, logged, tagged and doinked. There is a connection, a true and dramatically satisfying conclusion to which you will be inexorably drawn by logic, as long as you accept the truth of the pieces.
Good puns make unexpected connections. But even when they're not good, as titles they promise apodictic drama: "The linguistic connection exploited by this pun reveals and confirms a deep truth about the world". In other words, if there's a good pun to be made, it must be true. Kind of like the way scientists believe elegance to be a required quality of valid theory.
We sometimes use a similar method in planning. One of my planning mentors once told me that etymology is planning trick #1. Look up the derivation of a key word central to a brand and use that to come up with a deeper meaning you can communicate. Of course, earlier meanings of a word or word family don't necessarily reveal much about what people mean when they use a word today. But like a good pun, it sounds true.
Definitely would be a powerful stapler
Posted by: Staples | December 08, 2009 at 11:37 AM