Word Games
When I was at Sonoma State University studying in the Music Department, my attention was drawn to the very small tiles on the walls and floor of the bathroom. The tiles had wonderful names scrawled on them, names like reptile, infantile, etc. Of course, I felt it imperative for me to come up with new ways to name the tiles, like erectile, turnstile, and of course the Scopes Monkey Tile.
You just never know when a new skill like this will be needed. When I visited Southwest Philadelphia, where I grew up, I went to see St Francis De Sales, the Parrish where my boyhood friends attended parochial school. Throughout my entire childhood I’d never ever been to that church or school, prevented from visiting by social and cultural boundaries. Of course my Irish Catholic friends never visited my Hebrew school or Synagogue either. Surprisingly, I found out that St Francis DeSales is well known for its tile decorations. When I reported to my wife that the roof and interior of this edifice are covered in tiles, she repeatedly asked the question, “What kind of tiles, what kind of tiles?” Knowing nothing about the technicalities of tile making, what materials they’re made of, or where they come from, I was confused by the question. I didn’t know how to answer until my new found naming skills kicked in and my brain produced the answer. “Gentiles!” I said.
Along similar lines, I had to give a lot of thought to the restaurant industry when restaurants began charging corkage fees for bringing your own wine to dinner. So naturally I thought it follows that if you bring a crib for your baby, you pay cribbage. Let’s say you habitually drop food on your clothing when you eat like I do, so you bring some spare garb. Then they charge garbage. Of course If they get a cab for you, you pay cabbage. And a bag for taking home your leftovers yields “baggage.”
The advertising industry is ripe with opportunities for this kind of stuff. For instance, the married woman who is the spokesperson for the beverage industry is of course Mrs Sippy. And the single woman who doesn’t like people but nevertheless insists on using and rating the dating services badly is Miss Anne Thrope.
I have shared some of this material with my friend D., who has a PhD in English Literature and she was a teacher at a local university. I can only say that her response was yet another unanswerable question, “Have you no shame?”
