The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

The rebus
Who likes playing games?

This strange-looking sentence is called a rebus, which is a kind of picture puzzle. Rebus is Latin for “by things,” and in a rebus sentence you use pictures of things in place of words or parts of words. The person reading the rebus has to use the pictures to work out what it means.

Sometimes in a rebus you simply use a picture instead of a word, so a picture of a cat is used for the word cat. But in a true rebus, the pictures don’t mean what they look like, they mean what they soundlike. So in the rebus at the top of the page, the picture of an eye doesn’t mean “eye,” it means “I,” which is another word that sounds the same. And the picture of the can doesn’t mean a can of beans, but the word can,meaning “able to.” See if you can work out the whole sentence now.

This way of communicating words through pictures has been around for thousands of years, going back as far as some of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Rebuses are handy if you have a lot of people who can’t read, so they were popular in the Middle Ages, especially for things like coats of arms. Sometimes these were jokes—for example, the coat of arms of a family named Islip has a picture of an eye, and then a man falling out of a tree. (I-slip, get it?) Hmm, could you make up a rebus like this for your surname?

Over the years, rebuses have appeared in lots of unusual places. For example, the sixteenth-century artist Leonardo da Vinci, who painted the famous Mona Lisa,was fascinated by rebuses and sometimes put them in his paintings. In 1661 a Norwegian poet, Nils Thomasson, published a long wedding poem of rebuses, together with a set of instructions on how to make them up. Later, in the eighteenth century, rebuses were used as a kind of code by people in France wanting to spread secret messages. And during the American Revolution, a rebus was a popular way to write a thank-you letter or even a love letter. Lewis Carroll, the English writer of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,also liked to send rebus letters, usually to children to make them laugh.

If you look around nowadays, rebuses are everywhere—on the Internet, in advertisements, on T-shirts, even on television game shows. Often they use letters and numbers instead of pictures, like you do in text messages. So the number 4 will mean “for,” or the letter R stands for the word “are.”

Why do people love rebuses so much? Well, the Austrian psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud believed it was a very natural way to think. He said that when you have a strange dream, you should look at it as a kind of rebus, where words and pictures and symbols and sounds are all mixed up together. So, if you dream about a big hand holding a key, maybe you’re really dreaming about your hankie. (Then again, it could just be someone trying to unlock the door . . .)

Anyway, whatever the reason, rebuses are fun! Why don’t you make up some yourself? You could try single words to begin with, then see if you can do a whole sentence. Here’s one to get you started. Can you work it out?