Before you start beefing about my spare ribbing, remember that many a meaty pun has been cooked up as advice on how to succeed in the business of life and the life of business. "Don't be a carbon copy of someone else. Make your own impression," punned French philosopher Voltaire. "Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there," advised humorist Will Rogers centuries later.
Now let's get right to wit:
"Big shots are only little shots that keep on shooting," observed British writer Christopher Morley. Here are some more punderful maxims that merit a blue ribbin'. Sharpen your pun cells and start taking notes:
"Many people would sooner die than think -- and usually they do," lamented British philosopher Bertrand Russell, pun in cheek. Some puns can help us to climb the ladder of success without getting rung out:
Even though it's a jungle out there, a real zoo, this collection of beastly puns may help you succeed in a workaday world that depends on survival of the fittest:
© Richard Lederer
Among the students, almost 100% are African American, 87% qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch and more than 75% come from single-parent homes. Children are admitted on a random-selection basis, and are nurtured by Marva Collins's philosophy that all children can learn and there is no excuse for academic underachievement by ghetto children. The Marva Collins creed announces, "I will let society predict, but only I can determine what I will, can or cannot do." Mrs. Collins asserts that "Children don't fail; teachers do," and the school takes as its responsibility to ensure that every child succeeds.
Marva Collins Prep offers a demanding core curriculum of phonics, reading, poetry, vocabulary, foreign language and mathematics. I noted that the 5th-8th graders with whom I worked were already studying Latin and versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Julius Caesar, and when I performed some spoonerized stories for them, they knew what a spoonerism was. In addition, students are urged enroll co-curricular activities such as ballet, drama, chess, music, art and tae kwan do.
Test scores prove that Marva Collins Prep students consistently outperform their peers nationally, statewide and citywide. Among Marva Collins 4th graders, for example, 91% score average or above in reading compared to 55% of their peers in Milwaukee public schools, 69% in language arts compared to 53% and 71% in mathematics compared to 42%. Each student at Marva Collins is asked to write a mission statement about his or her goals in life. As a concrete example of the level of work in this remarkable Milwaukee school, I offer the mission statement of 5th-grader Marcus Jenkins:
"My mission in life is to become a successful neurosurgeon like Dr. Ben Carson. I recently read Gifted Hands by Dr. Carson and the book inspired me to want to be just like him. He has the abilities to save children's lives and he persevered in spite of everything that happened to him when he was growing up. Dr. Ben Carson is a true leader who takes pride in his work."'People with goals succeed because they know where they are going.' This proverb helps me to stay focused and think about what I want to do when I become an adult. Even though I am very young, just knowing that there are people out there who were once young boys full of hope for the future, just like me, makes me want to become someone very, very special, just like Dr. Ben Carson."
Marva Collins Preparatory School has increased its enrollment sixfold, with a waiting list of more than 100, since it opened its doors in 1997. During my visit I saw how powerfully the school had opened not just doors, but minds. As Marva Collins principal Robb Raugh says, "MCPS imparts an indisputable quality to each student: you are special, you are competent, you are capable. Years from now, that value system will be every bit as important as the quantitative scores we measure today."
We feel the strength of self-image in a statement from 4th-grader Jade Robertson: "I believe that I am special. I love myself even if nobody else does. I respect myself for being who I am. I know whatever I'm doing, I'm going to aim one degree higher."
© Richard Lederer
Photographs of Saddam’s atrocities prove the cruelty of his regime. These images have been collected into an exhibit, titled the “Iraqui Horrors Picture Show.” When Hollywood makes a movie about Saddam’s dark life, it’ll be called “Iraqniphobia.”
Before the war, Saddam built concrete bunkers because his accountant had told him he would need attacks shelter. This way he hoped to cover his assets.
Oil tanks considered, Saddam was an absolute hypocrite. Despite denial after denial, he clearly wanted to rule de Nile. And like Cleopatra, he made an asp of himself. I hear that they're going to name a city after Hussein, the city right next to Gomorrah. Then we'll have Saddam and Gomorrah.
When the Shiite hit the fan, the coalition of the willing exercised its freedom of warship. Saddam’s enemies have now given him a whoopin’ of mass destruction. We owe this to our brave troops and to our superior technology, the product of math instruction.
With Saddam’s buildings in ruins, he’ll be remembered not for his massive palace but for his passive malice. Saddam may be dead; he may be alive. If he is alive, some rogue state may have given him Hussein asylum. If that is the case, you can be sure that, even though Saddam thought he was the father of his country, the forces of good will eventually bag dad.
© Richard Lederer
Stuffed bears were popular before Theodore Roosevelt came along, but no one called them teddy bears.
Not until November, 1902, when the president went on a bear hunt in Smedes, Mississippi. Roosevelt was acting as adjudicator for a border dispute between the states of Louisiana and Mississippi. On November 14, during a break in the negotiations, he was invited by Southern friends to go bear hunting. Roosevelt felt that he could consolidate his supporters in the South by appearing among them in the relaxed atmosphere of a hunting party, so he accepted the invitation.
During the hunt, Roosevelt's friends cornered a bear cub, and a guide roped it to a tree for the president to shoot. But Roosevelt declined to shoot the cub, believing such an act to be beneath his dignity as a hunter and as a man: "If I shot that little fellow I wouldn't be able to look my boys in the face again."
That Sunday's Washington Post carried a cartoon, drawn by Clifford Berryman, of President Theodore Roosevelt. T. R. stood in hunting gear and with rifle in hand with his back turned toward the cowering cub. The caption read, "Drawing the line in Mississippi!" referring both to the ethical issue and the border dispute.
Now the story switches to the wilds of Brooklyn and Morris and Rose Michtom, Russian immigrants who owned a candy store where they sold handmade stuffed animals. Inspired by Berryman's cartoon, Rose Michtom made a toy bear and displayed it in the shop window. The bear proved enormously popular with the public, and the Michtoms began turning out stuffed cubs labeled Teddy's Bear, in honor of our 26th president. As the demand increased, the family hired extra seamstresses and rented a warehouse. Their operation eventually became the Ideal Toy Corporation.
When the Michtoms wrote President Roosevelt for permission to confer linguistic immortality upon him, T.R. replied, "I don't know what my name may mean to the bear business but you're welcome to use it.'' Clifford Berryman himself could have made a million dollars had he chosen to sell his idea to a toy manufacturer, but he refused: "I have made thousands of children happy; that is enough for me."
Emil Zola pulled the shades and composed by artificial light. Francis Bacon, we are told, knelt each day before creating his greatest works. Martin Luther could not compose unless his dog was lying at his feet, while Ben Jonson needed to hear his cat purring. Thomas Carlyle and Marcel Proust worked in noise-proof chambers. Alexander Pope and Jean Baptiste Racine could not write without first declaiming at the top of their voices.
For stimulation, Honoré de Balzac wrote in a monk's costume and drank at least twenty cups of coffee a day, eventually dying of caffeine poisoning. Johann Schiller started each of his writing sessions by opening the drawer of his desk and breathing in the fumes of the rotten apples he had stashed there. Victor Hugo went to perhaps the most extreme lengths to ensure his daily output of verbiage. He gave all his clothes to his servant with orders that they be returned only after he had finished his day's quota.
Compared to such strategies, my daily writing regimen is drearily normal. Perhaps that's because I'm a nonfictionalist -- a hunter-gatherer of language who records the sounds that escape from the holes in people's faces, leak from their pens, and luminesce up on their computer screens. I don't drink coffee. Rotten fruit doesn't inspire (literally "breathe into") me. My lifelong, heels-over-head love affair with language is my natural caffeine and fructose.
To be a writer, one must behave as writers behave. They write. And write. And write. The difference between a writer and a wannabe is that a writer is someone who can't not write, while a wannabe says, "One of these days when . . ., then I'll . . . ." Unable not to write, I write every day that I'm home.
A grocer doesn't wait to be inspired to go to the store or a banker to go to the bank. I can't afford the luxury of waiting to be inspired before I go to work. Writing is my job, and it happens to be a job that almost nobody gives up on purpose. I love my job as a writer, so I write. Every day that I can.
Long ago, I discovered that I would never become the great American novelist. I stink at cobbling characters dialogue, episode, and setting. A writer has to find out which kind of writer he or she is, and I somehow got born an English teacher with an ability to communicate ideas about language and literature.
Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote only in the early morning, Alain Rene Lesage at midday, and Lord Byron at midnight. Early on, I also discovered that I am more lark than owl -- more a morning person than a night person -- and certainly not a bat, one who writes through the night. I am usually up around 7:30 a.m. and banging away at the keyboard within an hour.
I write very little on paper, almost everything on my computer. My work possesses an informational density, and the computer allows me to enter all manner of matter onto the hard drive and accumulate that density. Theodore Sturgeon once wrote, "Nine-tenths of everything is crap." The computer allows me to dump crap into the hard drive without the sense of permanence that handwriting or type on paper used to signify to me. I'm visual, and shape my sentences and paragraphs most dexterously on a screen. The computer has not only trebled my output. It has made me a more joyful, liberated and better writer.
Genetic and environmental roulette have allowed me to be able to work in a silent or a noisy environment. I'm a speaker as well as a writer, so phone calls and faxes and e-messages chirp and hum and buzz in my writing room, and I often have to answer them during those precious morning hours. That's all right with me.
Fictionalists live with their characters, who get skittish and may flee a noisy room. As I write my essays, my readers are my covivants, and they will usually stay through outerworldly intrusions.
Besides, the business of the writing business gives me the privilege of being a writer. In fact, I consider the writing only about a half of my job. Writers don't make a living writing books. They make a living selling books. After all, I do have to support my writing habit.
When you are heels over head in love with what you do, you never work a day. That's me - butt over teakettle in love with being a writer -- a job that nobody who works it would give up on purpose. Imagine: a job that nobody wants to leave.
© Richard Lederer
"The limits of my language," wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, "are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for. . . . "of what we cannot speak, we must be silent." The world we perceive is the world we see through words. Human beings grapple with the mystery of life by trying to find words to say what it is. Without the word we are imprisoned; possessing the word, we are set free.
A century ago, a woman facing powerful handicaps wrote what is still the most famous account of what a human being becomes when imprisoned in a language-less world. In her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1902), she gave eloquent testimony to the emancipating power of language.
Most of us cannot remember learning our first word, but Helen Keller recalled that event in her life with a flashing vividness. She remembered because she was deaf, mute, and blind from the age of eighteen months and did not learn her first word until she was seven.
When Helen was six, an extraordinary teacher named Anne Mansfield Sullivan entered her life. Miss Sullivan was poor, ill and nearly blind herself, but she possessed a tenacious vitality that was to force her pupil's unwilling mind from the dark, silent prison in which it lived: "Before my teacher came to me, I lived in a world that was a no-world," writes Helen in an essay entitled "Before the Soul Dawn." "I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired."
In his play The Miracle Worker, William Gibson shows us what happened when Anne Sullivan first met Helen's mother:
MRS. KELLER: What will you teach her first?The miracle that Anne Sullivan worked was to give Helen Keller language, for only language could transform a small half-animal that looked like a child, a kuntu, into a human being, a muntu. Day after day, month after month, Anne Sullivan spelled words into Helen's hand. Finally, when Helen was seven years old and working with her teacher in the presence of water, she spoke her first word. Years later she described that moment in The Story of My Life:
ANNE SULLIVAN: First, last -- and in between, language.
MRS. KELLER: Language.
ANNE SULLIVAN: Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
Somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant that wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! . . . I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought.
Not only did Helen Keller learn to speak, write and understand the English language. She graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College and went on to become a distinguished lecturer and writer. But perhaps the most poignant moment in her life came when, at the age of nine, she was able to say to Anne Sullivan, "I am not dumb now."
© Richard Lederer
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