Download or read book Language Play written by David Crystal and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-06-11 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exhilarating and often hilarious book, David Crystal examines why we devote so much time and energy to language games, how professionals make a career of them, and how young children instinctively take to them. Crystal makes a simple argument-that since playing with language is so natural, a natural way to learn language is to play with it-while he discusses puns, crosswords, lipograms, comic alphabets, rhymes, funny voices taken from dialect and popular culture, limericks, anagrams, scat singing, and much more.