Explained variation Puns

My dad's favorite joke of all time (there are many variations, and of course, even more extended versions):

These three guys went to South America to explore the rain forest. The guide was leading them through explaining the different plants and animals. After awhile they started to hear this really loud sound.

whoosh

whoosh

whoosh

The men, kind of scared, asked the guide what the noise was.

"What the hell is that noise?"

"Oh, that's just the Foo bird."

"The Foo bird?"

"Yes, it's a giant bird, and the locals believe that if it poops on you, wiping it off will cause instant death."

"That's silly."

"Well, that's what the locals say."

The noise gets louder and closer.

WHOOSH

WHOOSH

WHOOSH

The men look up in the sky and see a glimpse of the Foo bird.

"It's huge!"

Suddenly...

SPLAT

All four of the men are covered with bird shit. The guide pulls a cloth out of his pocket and wipes the shit off of his face. He drops dead.

The first of the three men says, "that's got to be a coincidence."

He wipes the shit off, and drops dead.

The second guy nervously says, "it can't be true"

He wipes it off and drops dead.

The third guy doesn't wipe it off. He was found a few days later, and went home, refusing to be cleaned.

A few years pass, his life has been destroyed due to being covered in shit. His wife left him, his friends won't come near him, he can't find a job... One day, he's in the bathroom shaving around the shit.

"It's been years, most of it has flaked off, it's probably fine to wipe it off now."

He hesitates, but eventually grabs a towel, wets it down, and takes a deep breath.

He wipes the shit off, looks up into the mirror smiling, then drops dead.

The moral of the story is:

If the Foo shits, wear it.

Note: Quality Very Varying (I see what I did there) and sometimes subject to specialist knowledge. So I apologise in advance. Shame me with your better puns.

While I was languishing in the Language Centre, doing some semantics antics and considering how all the other linguistics students despised and derided me, I was accosted by a stout man with large glasses who made me a preposition. It was that I should collect terrible puns, to do with linguistics, in order to ingratiate myself yet further with the other linguistics students (including even the phonetics fanatics).

I'm struggling to think of a pun to do with grammaticality that both makes sense and "Is grandma tickly?" correct. I'm also stuck on 'morphologician'. (I'm not actually sure that's a particularly logical word for the subject, though I guess that's more for, er, more for a logician to worry about.)

The problem I have with writing about phonological variation is that one is constantly forced to choose between being fun or logical - very Asian!I always get in trouble with electricians, they think I'm calling them a 'dialectician' whereas in fact I'm just saying "Die, electrician."

I like pscycholinguistics – the only department of linguistics where it’s acceptable to wear a cycle helmet. My Australian accent is terrible but I like to think my Sath Efrican one is predicate. My favourite accent is Received Pronunciation, because it is the accent chiefly used by invisible Japanese people who are ordered online. When the first recipient of an invisible Japanese person got the parcel, they wrote a complaint saying "Received but can't see Asian" and the name stuck.

Why did the speakers whose native languages weren't English, but whose only shared language was English, but they weren't very good at it and kept on having to stop to think about it, stop talking to one another? They came to an agreement. (Get it? If not, write your answer on a pastecard and paste it to the below address.)

What did the 'a' say to the 'the'? "You definitely are ticklish, 'the'!"

Why was the small man eaten by the large bear, which was proportionately bigger than him? It had, er, relative claws.

I think the reason there are so many speakers of Russian is because they all partake in an activity called "copulae shun". (Ok, ok, I know, that was Pushkin it.)

I know a man called Hillary who can, might, should, did, must, shall and will ride an ox. We call him "Ox Hillary".

I always think the verb 'to be' in the senten