Words are fascinating just in themselves. What are they but a group of letters strung together with a certain sound associated with each specific letter. Together they represent something we’ve come in unison to agree about, and hearing those sounds we know we’ve just heard a word – or a sentence – and it meant something.

Consider how that all came about – Way back in some dark corridor of pre-history a bunch of creatures moved about the landscape looking for food and shelter from the elements. Language hadn’t been invented yet so they grunted a lot and waved their hands about, and a lot had to have gotten lost in the moment. They couldn’t even complain everything sounded Greek to them. Eventually they vocalized certain sounds consistently for specific things and gradually “words” were invented. I wonder, did they ever think what were wordsworth?

Anyway, over some unimaginably long stretch of time more “words” became quite handy because more things needed to be attended to, and until that happened it had to be massively frustrating to have things to say without any means of doing so. Social media hadn’t been invented yet, but something similar was happening that allowed a person to use charcoal and pigment to draw pictures of their cats on the walls of caves. Some things haven’t changed at all.

By the time we humans were able to string together a lengthy group of words in sentences, things had to be getting easier to deal with and frustration levels diminished considerably.

In those spare times between hunting and gathering, and later yet, after a long day tilling the soil, one can imagine the relaxed conversations around the evening fire about a new mammoth skin coat to replace the sloth hair jacket, or making some new antler bone needles before the winter chill sets in. By this time words were common and starting to be taken for granted.

I don’t know it for a fact, but do believe that during all these formative years that fathers all along were the court jesters and class clowns of their era, and “dad jokes” salted all of the conversations and interchanges between peoples of the neighborhoods. And I don’t know when exactly the word “pun” came about to describe these attempts at humor, but no matter, everyone knew when dad started talking that you couldn’t stop him from foisting some horrible tidbit on those within earshot. I believe this was when physicians and psychiatrists came up with the diagnosis of “Play-on-Words Syndrome” that described the involuntary groans they elicited, along with the side-effects of the rolling of the eyes and smirk on the lips.

We don’t give proper acknowledgement to the purveyors of word-play, those yellers of yarns, the teller of tales, who give us “dad jokes.”