Found Goddess Verbena: Goddess of Wordplay and Really Awful Verse

“I don’t get no respect,” Verbena complains, and it’s true. Worship of this inconspicuous but divinatory Goddess has been likened to addiction. Falling under Her spell is contracting an infectious disease. Once you start punning, they say, you just can’t stop.

Playing with words is a form of self-abuse that can start in childhood with little jokes picked up on Sesame Street. Or a child can be infected by an adult, who, finding an infant not wearing shoes, maliciously inquires, “Are you a barefoot boy or a boyfoot bear?”

Then it spreads. Some little ones are taken to Dr. Seuss, but instead of offering a cure, he actually makes it worse. It was Seuss, maker-up of words, who took the French verb grincher to name that green fellow who tried to steal Christmas.

The next stage is Muppetry, which is truly communicable, and if verbal frolic is allowed to grow, we reach the point where an apparently innocent child may announce—in mixed company, no less—that “transcendental” means “beyond teeth.”¹

Left untreated, the verbenized mind continues to disintegrate. It moves into limericks and doggerel. It falls into amphigory, psalmistry, and sonnetry. It can sink as low as vers libre (during the 1920s, free verse was so shameful that one such poet was transmogrified into a cockroach named archy). The verbal abuser may become a poetaster. He may spend his days writing rock lyrics. If sent to school, the punster may stumble into houses of dithyramb and epithalamia, by which time not even a strong dose of thesaurovaccine can help. Scholars in extremis have been known to resort to figurative language and literary allusion, and it is on record that a certain not-to-be-named graduate student once actually titled a term paper “Complex Oedipus.” Sad to say, such scholars often become professors, and professors are often anthologized.

The final stages of the overzealous worship of Verbena are sophistry and punditry. By then, it’s not funny anymore. But the sophists and pundits go on television. They judge, they argue, they split hairs, they bore, they earn big money.

Hail, Verbena, you’re the one,

Help me find just one more pun.

Barbara Ardinger, Ph.D. (www.barbaraardinger.com), is the author of Pagan Every Day: Finding the Extraordinary in Our Ordinary Lives (RedWheel/Weiser, 2006), a unique daybook of daily meditations, stories, and activities. Her earlier books are Finding New Goddesses, Quicksilver Moon, Goddess Meditations, and Practicing the Presence of the Goddess. Her day job is freelance editing for people who don’t want to embarrass themselves in print. Barbara lives in southern California. To purchase a signed copy of Finding New Goddesses, just send Barbara an email at bawriting@earthlink.net.