Wordplay

There are many ways in which you can manipulate words and play with them, some more elaborate and/ or complicated than others. Some are simply ingenious. Here are some of my favourites:


Lipogram
means writing a sentence or paragraph but omitting one letter or a group of letters of the alphabet. The most challenging here is of course trying to omit vowels, especially E, which is the most common letter in the English language. There is a variation to this called pangrammatic lipogram, where you have to use every letter of the alphabet except one. Example: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog (includes all letters except S)
other examples:
Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa – this one is amazing. The first chapter consists solely of words beginning with A. The second chapter also allows words beginning with B and so on, until in the 26^th chapter all words are permitted. In the next 26 chapters he reverses the process.


Gyles Brandreth – he has rewritten some of Shakespeare's works as lipograms! E.g. Hamlet without the letter I ('To be or not to be, that's the query')


Clerihew

after Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a four-line, sort-of biographical poem. It normally pokes fun at famous people, but without resorting to satire or abuse. The four lines of the poem are irregular in metre and length, the rhyme structure is AABB, the rhymes often forced. The first line of the poem always contains, and often consists solely of, the subject's name.

One of Bentley's best known clerihews is this:

“Sir Christopher Wren

Said, 'I am going to dine with some men.

If anyone calls

Say I am designing St. Paul's.'“

  but I also love this one, not by him:

"Did Descartes
Depart
With the thought
'Therefore I'm not'?"

 Palindrome 
the good old palindrome, a word / phrase/ sentence that reads the same forward and backward. Finding a single word palindrome is rather easy (e.g. noon, madam), but whole sentences that make at least some sense are much harder – well-known examples are 'Dammit, I'm mad' (a whole poem by Demetri Martin) , 'Step on no pets' (the second one even uses correct spacing) or ''Madam, I'm Adam'. The longest palindrome according to the Oxford English Dictionary is the onomatopoeic 'tattarrattat' which first appeared in James Joyce's Ulysses. There are also two whole palindromic novels (!): Satire: Veritas by David Stephens and Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo by Lawrence Levine (no, I have not read them). 

Spoonerism can be deliberate or merely a slip of the tongue; it means swapping consonants, vowels or morphemes between two words, e.g. a 'smart fellow' becomes a 'fart smeller' (yes, hilarious example, I know) 

Anagram a classic. It means reassembling the letters in a word or phrase to construct a new one. Some great examples, found in Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue: 
 Mother In Law – Woman Hitler 
William Shakespeare – I am a weakish speller
 Funeral – real fun 

And here a brilliant Monty Python sketch that includes anagrams and spoonerism. I read somewhere that Eric Idle can actually speak in anagrams and backwards, which is pretty cool. They also performed this sketch when I went to see them at the O2 a few days ago (yes! Be jealous!)