Selling America: Puns, Language, and Advertising, by Michel Monnot. New York: University Press of America, 1981. viii + 125 pp. $9.95 (paper).

Puns, by Walter Redfern. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984, 1985. 234 pp. $14.95 (cloth).

Of paronomasia there will surely never be an end; indeed, puns are and have always been as ubiquitous as the people who create them. In their respective books, Puns and Selling America: Puns, Language, and Advertising, Walter Redfern and Michel Monnot provide us with studies of some of those puns and punsters—and in so doing present "must" reading for anyone interested in language or paronomastic word-play.

"The Motions of Puns," Chapter Two, considers the mechanics of paronomasia—how puns work on the written page, in our minds, and how

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they function differently for their deliverers (i.e., writers and speakers) and receivers (i.e., readers and listeners). It is in his discussion of this last-named topic that Redfern begins to ask the reader implicit questions:

Why do we pun? What place or function do puns serve in our lives? And how are they a cause or result of the culture in which we live? Chapters Three and Four, "Making History I" and "Making History II," can be considered together, for in them Redfern documents puns in the literature and history of ancient through modern civilizations. Sanskrit literature, the Hindu Rig-Veda, and the writings of the Assyrians and Babylonians are all represented in Chapter Three, as are the works of Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden; in Chapter Four he considers the work of Swift, Lamb, Coleridge, Thoreau, Sartre, and Lewis Carroll. Again the question "Why do we pun?" surfaces, and for a variety of answers (e.g., it is economical, it satisfies an urge to play, it expresses dissatisfaction with everyday linguistic meaning, it allows the accent or avoidance of feelings both conscious and subconscious, etc.) Redfern examines the writings of Freud, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and others.

It is in Chapter Five, "The Extended Family," that Redfern begins branching out: here he discusses such "relatives" of puns as word-games, neologisms and portmanteau words, litotes and exaggeration, irony and parody, zeugma and syllepsis, and oxymoron and metaphor, as well as how each of these phenomena contributes to the making of puns. In Chapter Six, "Rounding Up," he discourses on paronomasia in relation to the doppelganger effect, schizophrenia, psychoanalysis, dreams, slips of the tongue, ethnic biases, "violent" and "sick" humor, and so on. And in Chapter Seven, "Puns Out and About," the general topic is puns in various aspects of our lives—including the press, the world of advertising, and the linguistic acquisition and creativity of children. Finally, in Chapter Eight, "Across the Rivers and into the Trees," Redfern’s bicultural loyalties to England and France surface as he considers English versus French puns, bilingual and bilingualist punning, and (perhaps to honor the French?) erotic and sexual puns. Redfern then offers the reader a Conclusion, in which he first says that paronomasia needs no defense, then proceeds to defend it or, at least, attempts to convince readers to accept it as an inevitable and harmless part of life.

All things considered, Puns is a good book: it is exhaustively researched, considers puns and punning from a variety of different perspectives and in a number of different languages and cultures, and yet remains entertaining. It does, however, have its flaws. Redfern’s method of documentation, for example, is first bothersome, then wearisome: he uses endnotes rather than footnotes, and uses no internal references whatsoever. This means that the reader is tempted to flip to the back of

the book at the occurrence of each superscript note numeral—and giving into such temptation yields nothing more than a bibliographic reference or even, perhaps, just a page number. And with 931 notes in 185 pages of text, that amounts to a great deal of fruitless flipping. Such a large number of notes leads to a second criticism of Puns: one is tempted to believe that the text is one very long quotation, with perhaps only the transitions and connectors that Redfern uses counting as original material. Moreover, all of the endnote citations are not included in the bibliography, which is "select." How frustrating it is to see only a name, title, and page reference in an endnote, and have to search through earlier notes for the complete documentation! Finally, some may be offended by Redfern’s writing style, which, with its choppy syntax and incomplete sentences, more resembles a Kurt Vonnegut novel than a scholarly piece of prose.

And now to Monnot’s book. Selling America: Puns, Language, and Advertising is an eminently readable (if overpriced) collection of puns from the world of advertising. Unlike Redfern, Monnot is a linguist, and hence interested in explanation and classification; thus after an Introduction that describes how the double meaning of puns is processed and understood by listeners and readers, he presents six informal chapters that catalogue and give exhaustive examples of puns according to their type. Chapter One discusses grammatical ambiguity, which occurs when the punning word can simultaneously be interpreted as two different parts of speech (e.g., "for slicker ideas," in which slicker can refer both to the product—yellow rain slickers—and to the idea of using the product, depending on whether the word is processed as a noun or an adjective). In Chapter Two, Monnot considers puns that convey a double meaning with no grammatical shift: a bank’s "our interest in you is guaranteed" is one example; a stick deodorant’s "get off your cans and get on the stick" is another.

Selling America is a delightful little book; both it and Puns will appeal to large groups of people. For lovers of puns they are compilations of hundreds of paronomastic creations that will entertain for hours; for lovers of language they are demonstrations of some of the ways in which words can be bent, twisted, and shaped into humorous molds; and for those interested in culture—whether as a whole or as seen through advertising—they are grand showings of how people play semantic games of expression with one another.