'play of words' is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it in any context when you want to describe words or phrases that have multiple meanings or a clever double entendre. For example, "The comedian's play of words had the audience in stitches."
You want me to treat you for worry?" This is another dazzling chess play of words.
There are silences, bursts of music, a terrific play of words and images, and switches in tempo that take us from an analysis of church architecture to a reconstruction of the fire itself by the Manchester authorities.
The same is true in Jessica Rankin's "Constant Return," with its chartlike play of words -- read, overheard, spoken, obsessively thought about -- hand-embroidered in overlapping layers on sheets of opaque fabric.
My job is to pitch a play so that the resonances intended by the play of words in one tongue seem still to be sparking in an entirely different time and culture.
In his 1973 book on Joyce, "Joysprick," Burgess made a provocative distinction between what he calls the "A" novelist and the "B" novelist: the A novelist is interested in plot, character and psychological insight, whereas the B novelist is interested, above all, in the play of words.
Then, unable to easily translate the play of words among the women and the men gathered below, who stood in separate groups, trading lines back and forth, in a resonant call and response, she said: "What they are trying to say is everything that they could not say for forty-two years.
Her early piece "Ceiling Painting" -- a ladder at the top of which the viewer may see, through a magnifying glass, the word "Yes" written on the ceiling -- immediately begins the play of word and artistic form.
I was going to do some kind of play on words in terms of "arrested," but I'm not going to do it.
"All of our campaigns, if you knew anything about our store, have always been plays of words..
The group is also known in longer form as Lulz Security - where "Lulz" is a play on words of the popular internet phrase "lol", meaning "laugh out loud".
Their name stood for Lulz Security - where "Lulz" is a play on words of the popular internet phrase "lol", meaning "laugh out loud".
