From The New York Times:

King Charles I’s court jester, Archy Armstrong, lost his job by saying grace — “Great praise be given to God and little laud to the Devil” — at dinner with the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The Newspeak of “1984” was meant to preclude, among other things, puns. “Its vocabulary was so constructed,” George Orwell wrote, “as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings.” And although the pun seems always to have had its comic uses, it is also a formal rhetorical device. The pun can be employed seriously, as when Lady Macbeth goes to smear the blood of murdered Duncan on some innocent servants: “I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt.” The problem with Pollack’s historical survey of puns is that it misses the greatest puns in history. He ignores many of the best practitioners of the idiom — Jesus and Sir Charles Napier, to name two. Jesus said to his disciple Peter, “Upon this rock I will build my church.” That was not only a pun on Peter’s name, which means rock, but also a pun on the character of Peter, who, in the garden of Gethsemane, would deny Jesus thrice before cockcrow. Napier led an unauthorized conquest of the Indian emirate of Sind and is supposed to have sent Queen Victoria a one-word dispatch: “Peccavi.” (Latin for “I have sinned.”)

Pollack mentions Abbott and Costello only in passing, without description or transcription of their “Who’s on first?” exchange. He also gives short shrift to the Marx Brothers, even though the “contract scene” in “A Night at the Opera” contains perhaps the 20th century’s most famous pun.

Groucho: “That’s in every contract. That’s, that’s what they call a ‘sanity clause.’ ”

Chico: “You can’t fool me. There ain’t no Sanity Claus.”

More here.

Two Poems by Michio Mado

From Discover:

Teenagers are a puzzle, and not just to their parents. When kids pass from childhood to adolescence their mortality rate doubles, despite the fact that teenagers are stronger and faster than children as well as more resistant to disease. Parents and scientists alike abound with explanations. It is tempting to put it down to plain stupidity: Teenagers have not yet learned how to make good choices. But that is simply not true. Psychologists have found that teenagers are about as adept as adults at recognizing the risks of dangerous behavior. Something else is at work.

Scientists are finally figuring out what that “something” is. Our brains have networks of neurons that weigh the costs and benefits of potential actions. Together these networks calculate how valuable things are and how far we’ll go to get them, making judgments in hundredths of a second, far from our conscious awareness. Recent research reveals that teen brains go awry because they weigh those consequences in peculiar ways. Some of the most telling insight into the adolescent mind comes not from humans but from rats. Around seven weeks after birth, rats hit puberty and begin to act a lot like human teens. They start spending less time with their parents and more with other adolescent rats; they become more curious about new experiences and increasingly explore their world. Teenage rats also develop new desires. It’s not just that they get interested in sex but also that their landscape of pleasure goes through an upheaval.

More here.