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A pun or paronomasia is a phrase that deliberately exploits confusion between similar-sounding words for humorous or rhetorical effect.

For example, in the sentence "Atheism is a non-prophet institution," the pun lies in the substitition of "prophet" for the similar-sounding word "profit" in the common phrase "non-profit institution".

Puns work through exploiting the confusion between two senses of the same written or spoken word, due to homophony, homography, homonymy, polysemy, or metaphorical usage. According to Walter Redfern, "To pun is to treat homonyms as synonyms" ¹.

Puns are a form of word play, and can occur in all natural languages. By definition, puns must be deliberate; an involuntary substitution of similar words is called a malapropism.

Etymology

The word pun has been used in English at least since the 16th century². It is thought to be originally a contraction of the (now archaic) pundigrion. This term is thought to have originated from punctilious, which itself derived from the Italian puntiglio, 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."

Typology

Puns can be classified in various ways:

• A perfect pun exploits word pairs that sound exactly alike (perfect homophones), or two senses of the same word:^{citation needed}:

• "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.

• "Question: Why do we still have troops in Germany? Answer: To keep the Slovaks in Czech."

(Pun on the words "check" and "Czech".)

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

• "You can tune a guitar, but you can't tuna fish. Unless of course, you play bass." —Douglas Adams

(Bass is a homographic pun on the identical spelling of /beɪs/ (low frequency), and /bæs/ (a kind of fish). Tuna is a play on "tune a".).

Homographic puns using words with same spelling but different pronunciations, like "bass" above, 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:^{citation needed}:

• "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".)

• A recursive pun is a sentence that contains a pun that refers to the similar sounding word:^{citation needed}:

• "π is only half a pie."

(Half a circle is 180 degrees or π radians, and a pie is circular).

• An extended pun or pun sequence is a long utterance that contains multiple puns with a common theme:^{citation needed}:

• "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 buttery. He claims to look forward to the suit, as he's always wanted to be a sous-chef."

(Egged: "to throw eggs at"/"to cheer-on". Peppered: "to add pepper to"/"to punch". Duck: a species of bird/"to bend down". Beet: pun on "beat". Weedy: "having a lot of vegetables"/"skinny". Maize: pun on "maze". A salt: pun on "assault". Suit: "lawsuit"/"clothes". Sous-: pun on "sue".)

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

(Moss: "must". Lichen: "liking". Fungi: "fun guy". Spore "poor". Algae: "I'll be". Mushroom: "fuiting body of a fungus"/"grow rapidly".)

• A Bad Pun, where the pun is overused, crude, or not understandable.

Formats for punning

There are numerous pun formats:

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

Usage

Comedy and jokes

Puns are a common source of humor in jokes and comedy shows. They are often used in the punchline of a joke, where they typically give a humorous meaning to a rather perplexing story. These are also known as feghoots. The following example comes from the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (though the punchline is at least five decades^{citation needed} older):

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?"

The last line uses a pun on the stock phrase "the lesser of two evils".

Gag names based on puns (such as calling a character who is always almost late Justin Thyme) can be found in many works, such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, Uderzo and Goscinny's Asterix albums, The Eyre Affair, the Carmen Sandiego computer games, and many works of Spider Robinson, including the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon series.

Literature

Examples of puns are found in the Bible (in both the Old and the New Testaments). A well-known example is found in the Matthew 16.18:

• "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church."

(In the Greek text, a play on the word "rock" (πετρα, petra) and the name "Peter" (πετρος, petros), which also means "stone".)

Puns on the names of pharaohs of Egypt, found in Biblical literature, have been used to date historical events^{citation needed}.

Non-humorous puns were and are a standard rhetorical or poetic device in English literature. Puns and other forms of word play have been used by many famous writers, such as Alexander Pope, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert Bloch. Here is an example from Shakespeare's Richard III:

• "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York"

(Son: play on "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."

Here are some additional examples:

• "As different as York from Leeds" — James Joyce in Finnegans Wake

(A play on the idiomatic expression "As different as chalk from cheese".)

On the other hand, puns are despised by some authors and critics as being too "vulgar" or "childish". For example, Samuel Johnson once gave the definition "Pun (n.): the lowest form of humour".

Publicity

Puns are often used in advertisement as an attention-getting device:

• "Thanks for the brake", a sign on the back of buses in certain cities in British Columbia (Such as Victoria and Nanaimo)

(Brake: pun on "break")

Acronyms and codes

• K-9, a designation for military dogs or police dogs

(A play on "canine", patterned after other military codes such as G-2.)

• Ru-21, a fictional Russian chemical that allegedly allowed KGB agents to drink extreme amounts of alcohol without having a hangover.

(Pun on the question "Are you twenty-one?" often heard when buying alcohol in the United States, inspired on RU-486, an abortion pill.)

Lexicon and names

• "Funny bone" is the popular name for a sensitive exposed nerve located where the humerus joins the ulna at the elbow.

(Apparently, the name is due to an intentional or accidental confusion between "humerus" and "humorous" ⁵.)

• The Viceroy butterfly closely resembles the Monarch butterfly

(A semantic play on the fact that a viceroy "wears the colors" of his monarch.)

Visual puns

Visual puns, where one of the confounding words is replaced by a picture, are the basis of many logos, emblems, insignia, and other graphic symbols:

• The U.S. 4th Infantry Division patch has four ivy leaves on it

(Play on the Roman numeral for 4, IV).

• The German Flakgruppe Wachtel suggested as an emblem "^W/₈"

(Play on the German word achtel, meaning "eighth".)

In European heraldry, this technique is called canting arms. Visual puns are also common in Dutch gable stones as well as in certain cartoons such as Lost Consonants or The Far Side.

Science

The term punning is sometimes used in science to describe either unintentional muddled thinking or intentional deception where the same word is used with two subtly different meanings. In statistical contexts, for example, the word significant is usually assumed to mean "statistically significant", which has a precisely defined technical meaning. Using significant with the meaning "of practical significance" in such contexts would be a case of "punning" in this sense.

In computer science, the term type punning refers to a programming technique that subverts or circumvents the type system of a programming language, by allowing a value of a certain type to be manipulated as a value of a different type.

Puns about puns

Puns and punning have often been the subject of puns:

• "There is nothing punny about bad puns." — original source unknown.

(Punny: play on "funny", in the idiomatic phrase "There is nothing funny about…".)

• "The pun is mightier than the word." — original source unknown

(Pun and word: plays on "pen" and "sword", in the saying "The pen is mightier than the sword".)

• "A pun is its own reword." — Dance Drier, British comedian

(Reword: pun on "reward", from the saying "Virtue is its own reward".)

• "Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted." — Fred Allen

(Quoted: pun on "quartered", an old form of capital punishment.)

• "Immanuel doesn't pun; he Kant." — Oscar Wilde

(Kant: play on "can't", in the name of philosopher Immanuel Kant)

• "A pun is the lowest form of humor, but poetry is much verse." — original source unknown

(Verse: pun on "worse", extending Samuel Johnson's definition of "patriotism", below.)

• "If puns are the lowest form of wit, are buns the lowest form of wheat?" — Piers Anthony

(Play on "puns"/"buns", "wit"/"wheat".)

• "Heralds don't pun; they cant." — Society for Creative Anachronism.

(Cant: pun on "can't", referring to the "canting arms" of heraldry)

• "Congratulations you have one, it's a year's subscription of bad puns" — Kurt Cobain, "Opinion"

(One: play on "won".)

• "Blunt and I made atrocious puns. I believe, indeed, that Miss Blunt herself made a little punkin, as I called it" —Henry James

(Punkin: play on "pumpkin", and on the diminutive suffix "-kin".)

• "A pun is the shortest distance between two straight lines." — original source unknown

(Play between the alternative meaning of "straight lines" ("straightforward sentences") and the geometric truism "a straight line is the shortest distance between two points".)

• "95% of the words in the English language can be incorporated into word-play (while the other 5% can be ex-pun-ged as im-pun-etrable)" — Wayne Redhart (spoof top 500 reviewer on Amazon.)

(Plays on "expunged" and "impenetrable".)

Quotes about puns

Here are some notable quotes about puns:

• "A pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself." — Doug Larson
• "The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability." — Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia, 1849
• "'The man', says Johnson, 'that would make / A pun, would pick a pocket!'" ." — Lewis Carroll, "Phantasmagoria", 1869
• "In the beginning was the pun." — Samuel Beckett, Murphy

See also

• Albur
• Alliteration
• Antanaclasis
• Auto-antonym
• dajare (puns in Japanese)
• Double entendre
• Feghoot
• Foerster's syndrome
• Jokes
• Letter game
• Malapropism
• Mondegreen
• Neologism
• Polyptoton
• Witzelsucht

References

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. doi:10.1515/humr.2004.17.4.381.  (Access to the full text may be restricted.)

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

External links

• On the relative (un)translatability of puns
• The International Save the Pun Foundation
• One controversial definition of puns