ATHENS, Ohio -- Calling it a "classic," the nation's oldest academic honor society has awarded a Phi Beta Kappa Book Award to an Ohio University Press book that is an exuberant study of the linguistic humor of the American Romantics, especially Henry David Thoreau.
Transcendental Wordplay: America's Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature, by Michael West, published by Ohio University Press in June 2000, has won the society's Christian Gauss Award, Phi Beta Kappa announced. This carries a prize of $2,500 for the author, who is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
"Transcendental Wordplay examines nineteenth-century American attitudes toward language -- the making of a new language inherited from English," Phi Beta Kappa said in its announcement. The judges noted that West "tries to determine where and how Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville and others got their proclivity for extravagant puns, riddles, acrostics, anagrams and other forms of word play."
The era's schoolteachers taught students grammar and the origins of words in ways that dramatized religious issues and sparked wordplay, explains West. Shaped by this, the New England transcendentalists searched for a primal language lurking beneath ordinary writing and speech. They encoded their quest in something akin to a secret language.
Transcendental Wordplay boldly attacks its topic, beginning with the table of contents, which boasts headings such as "Spellers, Punsters, and Spread-Eagle Linguists," "Antebellum America Goes Gaga over Grammar," and "Go Slow -- Man Thinking." West never lets scholarship stand in the way of a good pun, tallying the puns in Moby Dick (58) and sprinkling Transcendental Wordplay with "tons of puns" of his own.
"It will annoy some, tickle others, and become the seminal reading experience for many a graduate student," predicted one reviewer.
Founded in 1964, Ohio University Press publishes about forty-eight new scholarly, regional, and trade books a year and has more than 550 titles in print.
