This week: Witty, witless, half-wit, to wit - we’re talking about the most subjective of all topics, humor. And we’re starting out by trying to answer the question, “what does wit mean?” Here we go.
In high school, my bedroom walls were covered with posters, stickers, and every other kind of pre-digital detritus the teenage mind could attach significance to. Centered in pride of place between Marilyn Monroe1 and a bumper sticker that read "Heaven doesn't want me and Hell is afraid I'll take over," was a postcard featuring Mark Twain and bearing the quote, "I have never let schooling interfere with my education."
It's a great line; I was utterly heartbroken to learn that he never actually said it.2 Quotes are like that. A great line gets misattributed or misquoted or taken out of context and suddenly the greeting card aisle is full of clever bon mots, puns, sly observations, and sardonic witticisms that may or may not have been first said by someone famous somewhere sometime. And absolutely none of that context matters when we're laughing at the joke.
But let's back up. What is the difference between a witty one-liner and a joke? How about a pun and a play-on-words? Over the next few issues, we'll talk about these humorous words and more. Tonight, we start with "wit."3
Consider these three uses:
She's a real wit. She'll have you cracking up every time she talks.
My kid is being a real pill at the moment. I'm at my wit's end with him.
In my view, the situation has become untenable. To wit, my duties have continued to increase without a commensurate increase in salary.
How did one word come to mean, in order, that someone is funny, that one is out of patience, and that you are going to provide further explanation of the previous statement? The answer, as is so often the case when a word has acquired a number of disparate meanings, resides in its age.
From Word Origins: The Hidden Histories of English Words from A to Z by John Ayto:
Both the noun wit and the verb go back ultimately to the Indo-European base woid-, weid-, wid-. This originally meant ‘see’...but it developed metaphorically to ‘know’.
Ayto goes on to say that as the noun came to mean understanding and judgment alongside general knowing, we saw a rise in its use in phrases like "keep your wits about you." But it wasn't until the 16th century that it came to mean funny or clever.4
Interestingly, the word "witness" comes from the same PIE root and ties into the third case above, "to wit." In other words, originally, to wit was to know or to understand. Over time it slowly shifted to its current meaning of namely or that is to say. (According to Merriam-Webster.)
But I'd say the best definition of wit comes, naturally enough, from Ambrose Bierce in his Devil's Dictionary: "WIT, n. The salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out."
And on that note, I think we're done for this week. It's a little shorter than usual, but I've got a lightning storm going on outside my house and I want to get this posted before the power goes out. So, until next week,
Stay curious,
J
Sidenote:
This story about the origin of "witticism" was too long and too good to be just a footnote, so I'm adding it here. From The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins by Robert Hendrickson:
John Dryden coined witticism in his play The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man (1677), a dramatic version in rhymed couplets of Paradise Lost said to be written with Milton’s permission, but which was never performed, though the immoderate Dryden considered it “undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced.” The first official poet laureate and royal “historiographer” was immoderate in his wit, too— but he did not pen the acid remarks about John Wilmot, the second earl of Rochester, that Wilmot thought Dryden had written in 1679. Thinking he had, however, the furious Wilmot hired a band of masked thugs who severely cudgeled the poet. The prolific Dryden based witticism on the earlier criticism, writing: “A mighty Wittycism (if you will pardon a new word!) but there is some difference between a Laughter and a Critique.”
Footnotes:
I had several Marilyn posters; I discovered classic Hollywood through Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon and Marilyn Monroe's tragic story struck a chord with me. My "poster" was actually a photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson I carefully clipped out of a magazine. I still love the picture.
Here's a link to an article discussing it. The Twain essay they reference in the article, Taming the Bicycle (PDF link), is well worth the read. For that matter, every teacher reading this should print it out and post it in 900 point font in their classrooms.
In finding a good, all-encompassing definition, I searched through ebook versions of a few different etymology books. Only, because of the way search engines work, I often found it easier to search for "witty" or "witticism" and work backwards from there, if only because "wit" is contained in so many other words, most notably, and with no relation other than spelling, "with."
Etymology Online has a listing for "weet:" "to know" (archaic), 1540s, from Middle English weten, variant of witen "to know." — I want to use this everywhere. I envision a situation like the AAVE expression, "ya heard?" or perhaps the Scottish, "ya ken?" Ya weet?