ABSTRACT
Jean-Pierre Brisset retains much of the child's wonderment at words, the semi-magical early stages of language acquisition and control, the mystery before the mastery. Some of Brisset's puns are worthy only of the Almanach Vermot, familiar to Queneau's aspirant connoisseuse of language, Zazie. Exploiting his knowledge of foreign languages, Brisset can also go interlingual, macaronic, and pun for the sheer hell of it. On the threshold of the century of the Absurd in God and in the total reliability of language, would alone single out Brisset. To listen to a foreign language of which people are ignorant is to experience a seemingly unbroken chain of sounds. Despite his hostility to the very concept of neology, Brisset, by in effect rewriting language backwards, constantly and ineluctably neologizes: most of bis metanalyses have never been produced before, except perhaps by some unknown misspeller. In fact, Brisset is frequently prepared to borrow from other languages when French is caught short.
