Sack tapping Puns

And he's not letting anyone go home at reasonable hours or take leave until the big project's . He's been working early mornings and late nights . It's been going on for weeks. they're all tired and homesick. I haven't had a meal with him at home all month which really sucks because he was a great laugh at dinner time. Even when I do see him he's too overworked to even think straight.

Anyway, yesterday Phil, one of his workmates had a brilliant plan.

He turned to my Dad and said to him; "I've had enough of this crap, I'm going home and calling in sick for the next couple of days!"

My dad is amazed. "Phil!" he says, "You can't do that - you'll get sacked!"

"Don't worry, mate," says Phil, "I've got it all worked out." tapping his nose. Out of the blue he reaches up and grabs the ceiling fan (It was off) and hangs upside down from it. My dad has no idea what's going on and tries to ask him, but Phil doesn't answer.

Eventually the boss walks in and asks "Phil - what the Hell are you doing?"

"I'm a lightbulb." replies Phil.

The boss is surprised and realises the guy needs to go home and sends him off for a couple of days. All of a sudden my Dad gets up too and walks away.

"What do you think you're doing?" says the boss.

"You don't expect me to work in the Dark do you?" replies my Dad.

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