While I played, I pundered on the similarities between golf and politicians. In golf, you occasionally get a bad lie, but with politicians you get it a lot more frequent.
George Carlin was a punster. He had his famous 7 words that you could not say on television and now every movie has those 7 plus many more. If you have seen the film Wolf, then you heard the Carlin 7 more often than any other word. People that claim times have not changed simply are not correct.
The Carlin 7 dispute, (e.g. could he say them or could he not) as I understand it, went to the supreme court, which upheld Carlin's right to say the 7. And now there are no obscene words, just words, mere combinations of letters that have recognizable sounds. However, the ear of the beholder still determines the social acceptability of the word.
Carlin found language fascinating. He loved to read about language. I do too. And the more I read about language the more I am amazed that some language can be used to explain other language. Words are defined by other words, which are defined by other words, which are subsequently defined by other words. And so on. Although it may seem to many people to be an infinite number of possible words, with the 26 letters in the alphabet, possible word combinations are in fact in finite.
And that to me is what makes Puns Punny.
Bob
No comments:
Post a Comment