The writing system at play

Abstract

What is writing for? The standard answers would include Halliday’s (2003) ideational function for communicating ideas and interpersonal function for relating to other people, or else the written language as a permanent record. Few would mention the idea of play. Yet many people enjoy playing games with writing, whether in the form of letter rearrangements of Scrabble†, anagrams in crossword puzzles, ambigrams in tattoos, iPhone games like Scramble, cross-language puns in billboards (Stefanowitsch, 2002), or signs, such as the following one supposedly posted in a Bucharest hotel lobby: ‘‘The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that you will be unbearable’’ (quoted in Vaid, 2006). Attributes of the writing system are exploited by poets, such as the [twentieth century] lack of capital letters in e.e. cummings’ poetry or the [seventeenth century] use of shapes as in the angel-shaped poem of George Herbert, Easter Wings. Prose also exploits the writing system, as in the [eighteenth century] twirling of Uncle Toby’s cane in Tristram Shandy, the flowing LED capital letters of Chicago by Jenny Holzer, or the [twenty-first century] Tyne Line of Text Flow by Carol Sommer, Sue Downing and William Herbert, whose texts range from Latin to text messaging over 120 metres of Newcastle pavement. Significantly, this paragraph started with letter games and ended with public art: the writing system is played with in many ways and many different levels. Richard Gregory once observed that the distinctive thing about language is that it can create fictions, meaningful statements which do not correspond to the ‘‘real’’ world (Gregory, 1974); Jean-Paul Sartre argued that the crucial aspect of human language is its ability to describe what is not (Sartre, 1958/1943). The boundaries of human rule systems can be explored and deliberately transgressed. As depicted in Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1955), play is a central aspect of human culture. According to Gregory Bateson (1972, p. 180), the meaning of play is ‘‘These actions in which we now engage do not denote what these actions for which they stand would denote’’. Hence in writing system terms, play is when things are not what they seem, when written text is used in ways that deliberately transcend the typical mode, drawing WRITING SYSTEMS RESEARCH 2012, 4 (2), 120 121