pun

 

use of words, usually humorous, based on (a) the several meanings of one word, (b) a similarity of meaning between words that are pronounced the same, or (c) the difference in meanings between two words pronounced the same and spelled somewhat similarly, e.g., Thomas Hood's “They went and told the sexton and the sexton tolled the bell.” Puns have also been used seriously, as in the Bible, Mat. 16.18: “Thou art Peter [Gr. Petros], and upon this rock [Gr. petra] I will build my church.”

A pun (or paronomasia) is a phrase that deliberately exploits confusion between similar words for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious. For example, the sentence "the world is perspiring against me" is a pun on the paranoid's motto "the world is conspiring against me", that exploits the similarity between "conspiring" and "perspiring".

A pun may also exploit confusion between two senses of the same written or spoken word, due to homophony, homography, homonymy, polysemy, or metaphorical usage. As Walter Redfern succinctly said: "To pun is to treat homonyms as synonyms"^[1]. By definition, puns must be deliberate; an involuntary substitution of similar words is called a malapropism.

Puns are arguably the simplest and oldest form of word play, and are popular in all languages (although some people claim that that they are easier to construct in some languages than others).

Etymology

The word pun itself is thought to be originally a contraction of the (now archaic) pundigrion. This latter term is thought to have originated from punctilious, which itself derived from the Italian puntiglio (originally meaning "a fine point"), diminutive of punto, "point", from the Latin punctus, past participle of pungere, "to prick." These etymological sources are reported in the Oxford English Dictionary, which labels them "conjecture." (There is no creditable documentation for the notion that the word is a backronym for "play upon names"^{[2][citation needed]}.)

Typology

Puns can be classified in various ways:

• A perfect pun exploits words pairs that sound exactly alike (perfect homophones), or two senses of the same word:

• "Being in politics is just like playing golf: you are trapped in one bad lie after another."

(Pun on the two meanings of lie - "a deliberate untruth"/"the position in which something rests").

If the two words sound similar, but not identical, the pun is said to be imperfect.

• A homographic pun exploits different words (or word meanings) which are spelled the same way, whether they have the same sound or not:

• "Q: What instrument do fish like to play? A: A bass guitar."

(Pun on the identical spelling of /beɪs/ (low frequency), and /bæs/ (a kind of fish)).

Homographic puns using words with same spelling but different pronunciations, like this example, are said to be heteronymic.

Homographic puns are sometimes compared to the stylistic device antanaclasis, and homophonic puns to polyptoton; but these concepts are not identical.

• A compound pun is a sentence that contains two or more puns:

• "A man bought a cattle ranch for his sons and named it the 'Focus Ranch' because it was where the sons raise meat." ^[3]

(Pun on "where the sun's rays meet").

• Sign in a golf-cart shop: "When drinking, don't drive. Don't even putt."

(Puns on "driving" and "putting" a golf ball, vs. "driving" a car or "putting" around in a golf cart.)

• Punch line of a knock knock joke: Q: "Eskimo Christians Italian who?" A: "Eskimo Christians Italian no lies."

(Pun on the stock phrase "Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies".)

• An extended pun is a long utterance that contains multiple puns with a common theme:

• "A fight broke out in a kitchen. Egged on by the waiters, two cooks peppered each other with punches. One man, a greasy foie gras specialist, ducked the first blows, but his goose was cooked when the other cold-cocked him. The man who beet him, a weedy salad expert with big cauliflower ears, tried to flee the scene, but was cornered in the maize of tables by a husky off-duty cob. He was charged with a salt and battery. He claims to look forward to the suit, as he's always wanted to be a sous-chef."

• "I moss say I'm taking a lichen to that fun-gi, even though his jokes are in spore taste. Algae the first to say that they mushroom out of control."

Usage

Humor is the most common intent of puns in recent times. It is a form particularly admired in Britain, and forms a core element of the British cult comedy show I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue and in times past My Word. The late Richard Whiteley was famed for his dextrous use of puns as host of the UK words and numbers game show Countdown.

While generally eschewed in more formal settings, puns of greater or lesser subtlety are employed to good effect by many popular artists and writers. For example, names based on puns (such as calling a character who is always almost late Justin Thyme) can be found in Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, The Eyre Affair, Asterix, Hamlet, The Simpsons, the Carmen Sandiego computer games, and many works of Spider Robinson, including the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon series. This is known as a gag name.

In music, puns often find their way into hip hop/rap music as clever delivery of punchlines. For example, those who diss rapper 50 Cent often use a play of words on his stage name. Chino XL is often regarded as an expert when it comes to delivering such puns, often in an aphoristic manner: ". . . My dreams--I still leave none (nun) dead like Mother Theresa / Trekked to be a star (Star Trek), show no emotion like data. . . "

Literary puns

Examples of puns are found in the Bible (in both the Old and the New Testaments). Some of them are still current^{[citation needed]}. For example see Yeshu. Puns on the names of pharaohs of Egypt such as during the reign of Solomon, have been shown to provide dates of pharaoh reign or a time line to the stories^{[citation needed]}.

Theologist Michael Baker is well remembered for his use of puns.^{[citation needed]}

Many famous writers, such as Alexander Pope, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Bloch, and others, have used puns, along with other forms of word play. In the past, the serious pun was an important and standard rhetorical or poetic device, as in Shakespeare's Richard III:

"Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York"
(pun on homophony of son and sun)

(Shakespeare was also noted for his frequent play with less serious puns, the "quibbles" of the sort that made Samuel Johnson complain, "A quibble is to Shakespeare what luminous vapours are to the traveller! he follows it to all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible."^[4])

In the poem A Hymn to God the Father, John Donne, married to Anne More, puns repeatedly on his own name (which is pronounced "Dun"). The verses

"When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done

"For I have more."

can be interpreted as "God, when you have forgiven me this much, you are not finished/you do not have John Donne (safe yet), for I have more sins to confess." In the third stanza, having received assurance, counteracting his fears,

"that at my death Thy Son

"Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore"

(another Son/sun pun), he ends the poem

"And having done that, Thou hast done;

I fear no more."

A biblical pun of serious intent is found in Matthew 16.18: "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church." In the Greek original, the name "Peter" is πετρος (petros), which also means "stone"; and the word "rock" is πετρα (petra).

European heraldry contains the technique of canting arms, that can be considered punning. Visual puns, in which the image is at odds with the inscription, are also common in Dutch gable stones as well as in cartoons such as Lost Consonants or The Far Side.

Official puns

Official puns are rare, but there are a few, some of them intentional:

• K-9, pronounced "canine", for war dogs or police dogs follows the military pattern of designations, such as G-2.
• The U.S. 4th Infantry Division patch has four ivy leaves on it, from the Roman numeral for 4, IV. (This may be an example of canting arms; see above.) The German Flakgruppe Wachtel suggested as an emblem "^W/₈", achtel being German for "eighth".
• Ru-21 for the Russian chemical that allegedly allowed KGB agents to drink extreme amounts of alcohol without having a hangover. This spells the question "Are you twenty-one?", which is the question one could get when trying to buy alcohol in the United States
• "Thanks for the brake" on the back of buses in certain cities in British Columbia (Such as Victoria, British Columbia and Nanaimo), thanking the other motorists for allowing the stopped bus to reenter traffic flow as well as physically slowing down to permit this.
• The sensitive exposed nerve called the funny bone is located where the humerus joins the ulna at the elbow. The funny bone was more often called the crazy bone before the similarity between the words humerus and humorous was noticed.^[5]
• The Viceroy butterfly closely resembles the Monarch butterfly, much as in statecraft a viceroy "wears the colors" of the monarch.

Formats for punning

There are numerous pun formats:

• Tom Swifty
• Spoonerism
• Knock-knock joke
• Shaggy dog story
• Daffynition
• Transpositional pun
• Bilingual pun
• Malapropism

Science

The term punning is sometimes used to describe either unintentional muddled thinking or intentional deception where the same word (such as a homographic pun) is used with two subtly different meanings. For example, in statistics the word significant is usually assumed to be a shortened form of "statistically significant", with the associated precisely defined meaning. It is punning to use significant with the meaning "of practical significance" in contexts where "statistically significant" would be plausible interpretation.

Computer science

Main article: Type punning

A programming technique that subverts or circumvents the type system of a programming language in order to achieve an effect that would be difficult or impossible to achieve within the bounds of the formal language is commonly known as "type punning" in computer science.

Punny quotes

• "The pun is mightier than the word." — original source unknown
• "Pun (n.): the lowest form of humour" —Samuel Johnson, lexicographer
• "Puns are the last refuge of the witless." —another way of stating the above
  • "…but the height of wit." —common rebuttal to the above
• "A pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself." — Doug Larson
  • "…but poetry is much verse." — original source unknown
• "A pun is the lowest form of pastry." — original source unknown
• "If puns are the lowest form of humor, are buns the lowest form of bread?" — Piers Anthony, Author
• "A pun is the shortest distance between two straight lines." — original source unknown
• "A good pun is its own reword." — original source unknown
• "Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted." — Fred Allen
• "The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability." — Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia, 1849
• "He who would pun would pick a pocket." — Dr. Maturin, in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

• "Blunt and I made atrocious puns. I believe, indeed, that Miss Blunt herself made a little punkin, as I called it" —Henry James
• "Immanuel doesn't pun; he Kant." — Oscar Wilde
• "Heralds don't pun; they cant." SCA heralds' expression

More puns

• "As different as York from Leeds" — James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, a play on "As different as chalk from cheese".
• "Those clothes are hardly proper for the occasion"... "They are OR scrubs"...."Oh are they?". -From the Feature Film, Rushmore.
• From the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Captain Aubrey: "Do you see those two weevils, Doctor?...Which would you choose?"
Dr. Maturin: "Neither. There's not a scrap of difference between them. They're the same species of curculio."
Captain Aubrey: "If you had to choose. If you were forced to make a choice. If there were no other option."
Dr. Maturin: "Well, then, if you're going to push me. I would choose the right-hand weevil. It has significant advantage in both length and breadth."
Captain Aubrey: "There, I have you!...Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils?"

• What happened to the butcher who backed into his meat grinder? He got a little behind in his work.

See also

• Alliteration
• Albur
• Anagram
• Antanaclasis
• Auto-antonym
• dajare (puns in Japanese)
• Forster's Syndrome
• Feghoot
• Humor
• Insult
• Letter game
• Mondegreen
• Neologism
• Palindrome
• Polyptoton
• Portmanteau
  • List of portmanteaux
• Riddle
• Double entendre

References

1. ^ Puns, Blackwell, London, 1984
2. ^ Revision as of 01:09, 28 January 2007 by 200.44.6.188 (Talk)
3. ^ Charles Hockett, Cornell linguist
4. ^ Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare.
5. ^ Hendrickson, Robert A.. The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins (Facts on File Writer's Library). New York: Checkmark Books, 281. ISBN 0-8160-5992-6. 

Sources

• Hempelmann, Christian F. (September 2004). "Script opposition and logical mechanism in punning". HUMOR - Journal of the International Association for Humor Studies 17 (4): 381–392.  (Access to the full text may be restricted.)

• Smyth, Herbert Weir (1920). Greek Grammar. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, p. 681. ISBN 0-674-36250-0. 

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• The pun as a figure of speech
• alphaDictionary's Punny Pages
• On the relative (un)translatability of puns
• Pun of the Day
• PunGents
• PunLiners.com
• O. Henry Pun-Off annual competition in Austin, Texas (punPUNpun.com)
• Stefan's Bad Puns
• PunSite
• That's Punny - photo blog
• PunnyComics

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