Abstract

It is a well-known fact that anyone addicted to jokes based on wordplay deserves to be punished. My mathematician father was such a one. A mathematician friend of his, never previously known to display any signs of possessing a sense of humor, once wholly redeemed himself in the eyes of my revered parent by telling how, on a recent trip to China, he had been reminded of his colleague when seeing a sign giving a shop owner's name: Yu Pun Wong. To elucidate so subtle, elusive, and unstable a linguistic game as this from a culture so far from our own as the archaic Latin theater is a task requiring a high degree of, in almost equal measure, philological expertise, creative imagination, and generous readership. Fontaine brings the first two desiderata to this book; on the whole, I am inclined to bring the last.