Celebrating Silliness
Puns, mondegreens, Tom Swifties, limericks, solage and dad jokes. I love them all. Each is a playful form of expression that hits the ha-ha center of my brain in just the right spot. But here's what I've noticed after years of playing with these forms: they're all doing the same thing under the hood.
They all make your brain commit to one meaning, then yank the rug out and show you another meaning was hiding there the whole time. That little cognitive stumble is where the laugh lives. Once I saw this pattern, I couldn't unsee it. Every wordplay form I encountered was just a variation on the same trick.
Being hearing-impaired, I'm practically a mondegreen factory. Not just with song lyrics, but everyday conversation. It's an actual muscle that I flex often, much to the dismay of my family. The flex shows up as a word search in one of my puzzle books where the clues are misheard lyrics and solvers hunt for the proper lyrics in the grid.
My dad filled my impressionable years with Tom Swifties. We practiced new ones on each other all the time. I was most impressed with this one of his:
"I dropped the toothpaste," said Tom, crestfallen.
Once I start thinking in puns, something shifts in how I see language. Words become double agents. I start looking for opportunities to hide two meanings in one space. I try to create moments where the solver's brain does that little flip and discovers something was there all along.
That's what's waiting in this issue's puzzles. Groundhog Day meets wordplay. Let's go.
