The French, in accordance with their high regard for the cerebral, have long cultivated a love of wordplay.
The French, in accordance with their high regard for the cerebral, have long cultivated a love of wordplay. In the Middle Ages, they even had a post of Anagrammatist to the King. One of the great French wordplayers was the novelist Georges Perec, who before his early death in 1982 was a guiding force in the group called OuLiPo (for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), whose members delighted in setting themselves complex verbal challenges. Perec once wrote a novel without once using the letter e (such compositions are called lipograms) and also composed a 5,000-letter palindrome on the subject of, you guessed it, palindromes.
An example of a French rebus is “Ga = I am very hungry.” To understand it you must know that in French capital G (“G grand”) and small a (“a petit”) are pronounced the same as “J’ai grand appétit.” N’est-ce-pas? But the French go in for many other games, including some we don’t have. One of the more clever French word games is the holorime, a two-line poem in which each line is pronounced the same but uses different words. As you will quickly see from the following example, sense often takes a backseat to euphony in these contrivances:
“Par le bois du Djinn, ou s’entasse de l’éffroi,
“Parle! Bois du gin, ou cent tasses de lait froid!”
It translates roughly as “When going through the Djinn’s woods, surrounded by so much fear, keep talking. Drink gin or a hundred cups of cold milk.”
