Waitress: “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!” 

Actress Mae West: “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.” 

Despite its rules, the English language is supple enough for us to have fun with it. 

There’s word play, for instance. Take palindromes which are words or sentences that read the same forwards or backwards. 

Simple ones would be “civic” or “madam.” Or my mother tongue, Malayalam.  

The classier ones would include this most-referenced epigram: A man, a plan, a canal: Panama 

Or this, famously ascribed to Napoleon: Able was I ere I saw Elba. 

This was how the First Meeting began a very, very long time ago: Madam, in Eden, I’m Adam. 

And this guy seems to have a serious problem: Murder for a jar of red rum!

Then there are oxymorons which are phrases where contradictory words are put together to produce an unexpected, even comic, effect. In the original Greek, it literally means “keen stupidity”.

Shakespeare used them (“Sweet Sorrow”). So did the Beatles (“A Hard Day’s Night”) and Paul Simon (“Sound of Silence”).

Some movie titles had them in genuinely intelligent ways. Some  examples would certainly include True Lies; Eyes Wide Shut; and Back to the Future. 

There are funny, even ridiculous, examples. “Friendly fire” isn’t, while “controlled chaos” has never been held in check.  

Another  “definite maybe” is  “civil war.” It’s an absurd and     lunatic phrase. Wars are never mannerly, courteous or polite. If anything, they are frightening, beastly and heartless. 

It gets worse in a nuclear war. In that instance, Abraham Lincoln’s famous condition takes a turn for the hearse, morphing into: “All men are cremated equal”. 

The latter was a pun, craftier jokes that exploit the different meanings of words. Most are self-explanatory as in: my friend drove his expensive car into a tree and saw, first hand, how a   Mercedes bends.  

Life is a series of ups and downs which in jokey fashion might be described thus: One day you’re the best thing since sliced bread; the next, you’re toast.

Rodney Dangerfield was a New York comic famous for delivering killer lines in woebegone fashion: “My ex-wife still misses me but her aim is improving.”

He also had this: “I just found out I’m colour blind. The news came completely out of the green.”

Some jokes come fast and furious: Have you heard about the dyslexic who walked into a bra?

When asked to make a sentence with “lethargy,” TV host Johnny Carson famously replied with a lisp:  “What the world needs is more, not leth-argy”.

And the comic cracked this after the film came out: “Never argue with a dinosaur; you’ll get jurasskicked.”     

Then there’s wit, the ability to come up with intelligently funny, even scathing, stuff. 

This from John Lennon: “So what if I don’t know what apocalypse means? It’s not like it’s the end of the world”.

The poet and writer Dorothy Parker could be sarcastic. She had this to say about Katharine Hepburn’s performance on Broadway: “She ran the  gamut of emotions – from A to B.”

But she could also be practical: “Brevity is the soul of lingerie”.

Even so, the master of the bon mot would have to be English writer, playwright, and full time cynic Oscar Wilde: “Some men cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” 

And there is very little to beat his wry observation:  “True friends stab you in the front.”

ENDS