Language Play - Softcover

In this text, David Crystal examines why we devote so much time and energy to language games, how professionals make a career of them, and how young children instinctively take to them. Crystal makes a simple argument - that since playing with language is so natural, a natural way to learn language is to play with it - while he discusses puns, cross-words, lipograms, comic alphabets, rhymes, funny voices taken from dialect and popular culture, limericks, anagrams, and scat singing.

In this exhilarating and often hilarious book, David Crystal examines why we devote so much time and energy to language games, how professionals make a career of them, and how young children instinctively take to them. Crystal makes a simple argument-that since playing with language is so natural, a natural way to learn language is to play with it-while he discusses puns, crosswords, lipograms, comic alphabets, rhymes, funny voices taken from dialect and popular culture, limericks, anagrams, scat singing, and much more.