Familiar Wife Puns

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

Got my wife with two the other day when we were grocery shopping.

She goes to get a ginger root from the produce section, and I yell at her

STOP!!

"...what?" she asks

I answer "You are doing it wrong, you have to pick it up carefully"

And i proceed to very slowly lift one ginger root out of the pile, being extra careful to support it.

"...what are you doing?" My wife is now very confused.

"You have to lift it......gingerly".

She hits me.

Not five minutes later, we are getting celery.

"I think this one looks familiar" I say

"What?" again, she falls into my trap

"Yeah....this one has been following me around, creepily, from a distance. It's a Celery Stalk(er)."

She hit me again.

Went out for an anniversary dinner with the wife and kids to the Old Spaghetti Factory. If you're not familiar, their mascot is a trolley car and most restaurants have one right in the middle.

We got seated at a table in the trolley, and service was great... At first. And then it became apparent that our server had given up on any sort of tip. So, at the end of the meal...

Wife: "We shouldn't tip her very well. Our service was terrible at the end."

Me: "Yeah, it really went off the rails."

Wife: eyeroll

Wife: What time are you working until?

Wife: 5?

Me: 4:30

Wife: This conversation is oddly familiar

Me: or is it evenly familiar?