To Wit: An E-zine On How To Be a Wit
10/10/2007

This is an E-zine from Thomas Christopher on how to be witty.

WITTY SELF-EXPRESSION PRODUCTS

I'm offering T-shirts and other self-expression products designed using the techniques discussed here. I've set up an online "store" at CafePress.com: www.CafePress.com/wittyexpression My portal site to CafePress and Printfection.com is wittyselfexpression.com. I expect to use many of the designs as examples in this e-zine.

Reforming clichés

"Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly."

This statement plays on the cliché, "Anything worth doing is worth doing well," by substituting "poorly" for "well." The substitution of new words or syllables into a well-known phrase is called "reforming." Reforming is frequently used as a pun for a headline or for a title or a subtitle.

The substituted words should have some connection to the words they are replacing. For example, "well" and "poorly" are antonyms. More commonly, the words substituted simply sound like the words they replace. They have the same rhythm and many of the same sounds in the same positions.

Suppose we are advising someone not to try to be funny while intoxicated. We could say, "There's many the slip twixt cup and quip," playing off of the cautionary saying, "There's many the slip twixt cup and lip." Here we are substituting a one-syllable word, "quip," for a one-syllable word it rhymes with.

Often reforming gets much more complicated. Dorothy Parker was asked to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence. She said, "You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think," playing off the cliché, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink." Here there are several substitutions, rather than one. "Think" for "drink" substitutes a single rhyming syllable. "Her" for "him" substitutes one single-syllable personal pronoun for another, and the two alliterate.

The third substitution is much more involved. "Horticulture" has the same rhythm as "horse to water." They share the sounds "hor-" "t-" and "-er" in the same places. But what makes the reformed cliché work is another, unexpressed substitution. The implied "whore to culture" sounds like both "horse to water" with which it shares "hor-" "to" and "-er" in the same positions, and “horticulture” with which it shares "hor-" "t-" and "culture."

Dorothy Parker's reforming was just for fun, but most of the time we need it to say something relevant to the point you are trying to make. To do that, you need to go through a much more involved procedure:

1. Start with a concept word, a word relevant to your point. Put that word as the first entry on a list of related concept words. For example, start with "wit."
2. Use a thesaurus and look up synonyms for the concept word and put them on the list. Choose in particular synonyms that have different rhymes. Among the synonyms for "wit" we find "quip" and "jive."
3. Look up antonyms as well and put them on the list. You can talk about one thing by talking about its opposite. Again, prefer words with different rhymes.
4. For each of the words on the list, look up its rhymes in a rhyming dictionary. For "quip," we find "lip." For "jive," we find "drive."
5. For each of those rhyming words, find as many well-known phrases as you can that include it. For "lip," among others we find: "There's many the slip twixt cup and lip." For "drive": "Don't drink and drive."
6. Substitute the concept word into the phrase for the word it rhymes with and make what other adjustments the phrase seems to call for.
7. Select those that are best for your purpose. In our example, that's how we get, "There's many the slip twixt cup and quip. Don't drink and jive."

Yes, this is a lot of work.

The most famous story of reforming involves a savings and loan company in California that contracted with an ad agency for a radio campaign. The creative at the ad agency went through the process: "What does the company offer? Among other things: loans. Okay, what sounds like ‘loan’? ‘Lone.’ ‘Lone star.’ ‘Lone pine.’ ‘Lone Ranger.’ Aha, ‘loan arranger.’” So all the ads had a western theme and ended with, "Call our loan arranger, and pronto."

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