The Joy of Speaking

Here's an explanatory factor in language change that I don't know if anyone else has mentioned, but I think is an important consideration: fun. Why is it that we like to play with our words, mix them up and twist them around? And why does it make us laugh? I think humor has an important, if under-appreciated place in human culture.

I was fortunate enough to have friends in high school who (while doing nothing for my GPA) introduced me to the sheer exuberance of language.  I suppose a good part of it was figuring out how to exchange information within the group in such a way as to prevent those outside from understanding (and thus ruining our nefarious plans), but we became disturbingly comfortable twisting language around.

One method was to replace all the vowels in a key word with /æ/ (as in "cAt"). It takes some practice, but the results are hilarious and rather difficult to decipher without inside information. Sometimes, we would simply reverse the order of segments in a word, saying it "backwards."

I have yet to run across a formal theory about such phonological word games, although it is reminiscent of Pig Latin and other such things. Certainly most of our innovations were dead and buried before the turn of the century, but there are a select few that continue to amuse us, and even been passed on to new members of the group.

This raises some interesting questions about language innovation.  Does the amusement value of a word affect the frequency with which it is used, passed on?  How does one quantify the funniness of a word?