Excerpt from "Lies" by Christopher Ricks:

...I should like to ask some questions about a particular obviousness: that liein English means both to say something false while knowing it to be so, and to rest or (expressive of bodily posture) to be in a prostrate or recumbent position. A pun, after all, is likely to be a compacting or constellating of language and literature, of social and cultural circumstance.

There is potency in the pun or the suggestive homophone. "Miscegenation" must be a bad thing. Does it not confess that it is a mis-something? (All it really confesses, of course, is that it is a miscere-something, but the word still carries its infection.) Similarily, "What's good for General Motors is good for America" presses us to concede the claim made by general (not invidiously particular or sectional, and with a touch of "captains of industry" authority); a quite other route would have to be taken if the language were to press us to concede that "What's good for A.B. Dick is good for America." Again, the polical energy of a strike (and perhaps the credulity as to its effectiveness) profits from the crisp energy of the word, a word - strike - which accords to an enterprise which is one of withdrawal, passivity, and attrition the associations of something which is on the offensive, active, and speedy.

Christopher Ricks, professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Milton's Grand Style, Tennyson, Poems and Critics, and Keats and Embarrassment. He is also editor of the journal Essays in Criticism.

© 1975 by The University of Chicago. All excerpts appear in Critical Inquiry, Volume 2, Number 1 (Autumn 1975). This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice is carried and that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or reduplication of this text in other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the authors and the University of Chicago Press.

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