As well as collecting toys over the years, I've also collected other things like funny limericks
and what I would call wordplay. I've got two particularly interesting types of wordplay to
show you, which I think are just amazing, and it's something perhaps you could have a go at doing.
The first was shown by Martin Gardner, I think about 30 years ago, in one of his books.
It was called 'decapitated sentences'. Decapitated Sentences? Well yes, this is the one he showed.
I'll show it up to camera; it reads 'Show this bold Prussian that praises slaughter -
slaughter brings rout.' I've got a bit of trouble with this. It's obviously poetic, but that second line
really troubles me. How on earth could 'praises slaughter?' Slaughter certainly brings rout,
when you have the battle turns, and the enemy runs away, there's a slaughter and there's a rout,
so that's fair enough. But I don't quite understand that. But anyway, I'll let that go,
because the fun of it is when you 'decapitate', which means you cut out the first letter
of each word. I've done it here, and I'll do an even clearer version for you. So there we are,
there's the poem, and with the blue line I've crossed through every single [first letter] It's a bit
of an effort [to read] so what I'll do is I'll do that [shows new version] and this is what actually
happens underneath, and it's easier to read. 'How his old Russian hat - hang on I'm going to have a
Russian hat for this don't forget - 'How his old Russian hat raises laughter, laughter rings out.'
That actually flows much better as two lines of poetry, than the first bit, with the slaughter
brings praises. But it's a lovely idea. I also think it's a little bit vicious to talk about some
decapitated sentences, it's more like going into the barber [for] a haircut, and
the barber's trimming each word, just trimming off the first one [letter] To start this,
you just want to go through about 30 or 40 words, write them down, ones that when you cut out the
first letter still makes another word; some of them change their actual type of English;
Well, I mean the first word there is 'show' which is a I think it's a verb, turns into 'how'
which is an interrogatory adverb; so they change also their their actual English meaning.
So it's a lovely concept that, and something worth trying out yourself. Just take a sentence,
cut out the first letter, and see if you can make another sentence out of it.
That's what Martin Gardner did. So, wordplay at its best I think. The second one is much more ingenious.
It was invented, completely unbeknownst to me until very recently, by Lewis Carroll. This is the man
who wrote Alice in Wonderland, and was actually Charles Dodgson, an academic at Oxford University back
in the 1870s or so. This is a poem he wrote, which I'll read out. It's quite sweet, it's not that
obvious what it means, but I'll see if I can get it to come in [to focus]. 'I often wondered when I cursed,
Often feared where I would be - Wondered where she'd yield her love, when I yield so will she.
I would her will be pitied! Cursed be love! She pitied me...' A bit odd, a bit obscure, but you know, poetry
is like that sometimes. Now here's the clever bit, which I think is absolutely ingenious.
The first line 'I often wondered when I cursed -'
happens to be also the first word of each of the lines going down. 'I often wondered when I cursed -'
And the last line for instance - 'Cursed be love, she pitied me... is also the last word going down.
So this was pointed out in the books that I was reading, I thought that's very clever.
But a friend of mine who is much more observant said 'hang on, there's something else going on.'
So when I looked at it very carefully, what I did was I put it into a grid like this,
I filled it up, and now you suddenly see
every single line and every single column actually matches up; let's see if I can get that to go [into focus]
'I often when I cursed,' and there's the column; take the second line 'Often
feared where I would be -' and now look at the second column - 'Often feared where I would be -' the
whole darn thing hangs together. When I came across it originally, it was in a book, a large book of word play,
and it was produced like this, and it told me that it was invented by Lewis Carroll, and they'd only
spotted that the first line did this magic thing, and the last line, but not the middle bit there...
and I swallowed that one, and when I took it along to show the friend of mine who's much
more perceptive than I am, he said hang on a sec[ond], all the middle ones work as well, so that's when I realized you've actually got to produce something like this to make it out,
and make it apparent. It's an extraordinary thing, a square poem, where every line also coincides ...
the first line with the first column, the second line with the second column, all the way through,
so ingenious, I think that's absolutely ingenious. Do you want to have a go? I'd probably start with
four lines of poetry and four words in each line and see if I can
make a start there, but it's a difficult thing to do, and Lewis Carroll was obviously
a very very fine wordsmith to produce something like that. I think it's wonderful!!