Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Translating these kinds of circulating jokes means matching the pattern made by the interplay of presupposition and meaning that constitutes the point, and then rewriting all the rest to suit. An ability to recognize the match is not rare, and may be almost universal. But the ability to find a good match is one that only some people have. However, we don’t have to go far to find humorous uses of language that work in a slightly different way.

A Brooklyn baker became deeply irritated by a little old lady who kept standing in line to ask for a dozen bagels on a Tuesday morning despite his having put a big sign in his window to say that bagels were not available on Tuesday mornings. When she got to the head of the line for the fifth time in a row, the baker decided not to shout and scream but to get the message through this way instead.

“Lady, tell me, do you know how to spell cat—as in catechism?”

“Sure I do. That’s C-A-T.”

“Good,” the baker replies. “Now tell me, how do you spell dog—as in dogmatic?”

“Why, that’s D-O-G.”

“Excellent! So how do you spell fuck, as in bagels?”

“But there ain’t no fuck in bagels!” the little old lady exclaims.

“That’s precisely what I’ve been trying to tell you all morning!”

There are different ways of saying what the point of this—admittedly paltry—joke is. It makes a character speak out loud a truth she had been unable to internalize. There’s no reason to suppose that matches cannot be found in any language to make fun of some person in the same way. The overall point is made by playing on a difference between written and oral language: structurally similar plays can probably be found and constructed in any language that has an imperfectly phonetic writing system. But once we get down to the implementation of these two features, hunting for matches becomes much more difficult. The assimilation of the present participle of a taboo word to the stem of that word plus the preposition in is possible only because in English the distinguishing mark of the first—the final consonant, g—is habitually dropped in colloquial speech. That’s a low-level, local feature of a particular language, and it turns on the slight mismatch between its spoken and written forms. A structural match in any other language would most likely have to turn on a phonetically and grammatically different feature that may or may not allow the same point—making someone stupid say what they don’t want to understand by diverting their attention from the issue through an intentionally deceptive spelling game.

What’s usually considered to be at issue in humor of this kind is the capacity that all languages have for referring to themselves, and thus for playing games with words. Metalinguistic expressions—sentences and phrases that refer to some aspect of their own linguistic form—carry meanings that are by definition internal to the language in which they are couched. “There ain’t no fuck in bagels” may be vulgar and silly, but it is a good-enough example of a metalinguistic expression. It is not about bagels, only about the spelling and pronunciation of a word of the English language seen exclusively as a word and not as a sign. “Plays on the signifier” are traditionally viewed as the dark corner of language, where translation becomes a paradoxical, impossible challenge.

That would be a valid position if the criteria for an acceptable match obligatorily included matching the signifiers themselves. But they obviously do not. What a translation makes match never includes the signifiers themselves. It would not count as a translation if it did.

Just as only some jokes exploit the metalinguistic function of language, so not all self-referring expressions are funny. Especially not those used as example sentences by philosophers of language, such as:

1. There are seven words in this sentence.

It is no trouble to find a matching sentence in German:

2. Es gibt sieben Wörter in diesem Satz.

However, that particular translinguistic match is regarded as a happenstance—an arbitrary and irrational coincidence in a particular case. What’s usually seen as problematic about sentences such as (1) is that they cannot reliably be translated into other tongues, and they thus appear to contradict the axiom of effability—that any thought a person can have can be expressed by some sentence in any natural language, and that anything that can be expressed in one language can also be expressed in another (see chapter 13).

The real problem with a sentence such as (1) is that it can’t be translated into English, either. “This sentence consists of seven words” rephrases (“translates”) (1), but by doing so it becomes counterfactual, which (1) is not. Likewise, rephrasing it in French produces an untruth if you think that translation means matching signifiers one by one with equivalents provided by pocket dictionaries:

3. Il y a sept mots dans cette phrase.