“There is growing evidence that children rather than adults have the kind of minds that are capable of creating new languages, which suggests that language-making is a kind of play. Spoken dialogue is highly fluid and unpredictable, like play, but like most games it also has many strict rules. It also seems that the play of language is tied up with the mystery of humor. Storytellers from the beginning of time have made us laugh and shake our heads. The ambiguity of words makes language the perfect medium for exploring the nature of ambiguity, which is what humor does. How appropriate that humor should also be the best means of diffusing tensions, often the very tensions created by the struggle to communicate.”