Sense and respond Puns

Trevor loved tractors. And I mean, really loved tractors. Forget any obsessions or high-level interests you may have, chances are they pale in the face of Trevor’s love for tractors.

Every day Trevor would get up, in his tractor-themed bedroom in his tractor-themed house, with its tractor-themed wallpaper and tractor-themed carpets, and he would make his bed with its tractor-themed duvet and tractor-themed sheets. He would go downstairs in his tractor-themed pajamas into his tractor-themed kitchen, with its tractor-themed tiles and cupboards, and he would eat his breakfast while perusing the latest tractor-themed magazine or annual.

Trevors’s degree in Agricultural Engineering hung on his living room wall, along with a copy of his thesis, which centred around (you guessed it) tractors. The living room was decorated with all sorts of tractor-related trinkets, including die-cast models, paintings and drawings.

The hedges in Trevor’s front garden were trimmed in the shape of tractors. His lawn was vividly decorated with tractor-driving garden gnomes, and his garden furniture was constructed from various parts from vintage tractor designs.

Trevor just had one thing missing from his otherwise tractor-centric life; he had never actually owned, nor driven, a real tractor.

Not for his lack of trying, of course. Trevor had been to many tractor shows over the years, and visited many farms with friends of his, but none of the tractors he had seen had ever been quite right. Trevor was so knowledgeable about tractors that every single one he had come across had possessed some hidden trait that he wasn’t keen on. His first experience of driving a real tractor had to be perfect.

One day, Trevor was flicking through one of his favourite publications, Powertrain Quarterly, when there was a knock at the door. Trevor answered, and it was his friend and fellow tractor enthusiast, Jeff.

Trevor welcomed Jeff in, and over tea and crumpets served on tractor-themed crockery, they discussed the merits of aluminium drawbars and front-end loaders. Eventually Trevor pressed Jeff to explain the reason for his visit.

“Well” said Jeff, “As I’m sure you know the convention comes to town later”.

The convention. Trevor had been thinking of little else the past three weeks. The neighbouring town annually threw a convention for farmers, particularly farmyard machinery. There would be combine harvesters, lawnmowers, and of course, tractors.

“Yes of course” replied Trevor

I have written this book to sweep away all misunderstandings about the crafty art of punnery and to convince you that the pun is well worth celebrating.... After all, the pun is mightier than the sword, and these days you are much more likely to run into a pun than into a sword. [A pun is a witticism involving the playful use of a word in different senses, or of words which differ in meaning but sound alike.]

Scoffing at puns seems to be a conditioned reflex, and through the centuries a steady barrage of libel and slander has been aimed at the practice of punning. Nearly three hundred years ago John Dennis sneered, “A pun is the lowest form of wit,” a charge that has been butted and rebutted by a mighty line of pundits and punheads.

Henry Erskine, for example, has protested that if a pun is the lowest form of wit, “It is, therefore, the foundation of all wit.” Oscar Levant has added a tag line: “A pun is the lowest form of humor—when you don’t think of it first.” John Crosbie and Bob Davies have responded to Dennis with hot, cross puns: “...If someone complains that punning is the lowest form of humor you can tell them that poetry is verse.”

Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth century self-appointed custodian of the English language, once thundered, “To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the national till without remorse... ”

Joseph Addison pronounced that the seeds of punning are in the minds of all men, and tho’ they may be subdued by reason, reflection, and good sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest genius, that which is not broken and cultivated by the rules of art.

Far from being invertebrate, the inveterate punster is a brave entertainer. He or she loves to create a three-ring circus of words: words clowning, words teetering on tightropes, words swinging from tent tops, words thrusting their head into the mouths of lions. Punnery can be highly entertaining, but it is always a risky business. The humor can fall on its face, it can lose its balance and plunge into the sawdust, or it can be decapitated by the snapping shut of jaws. While circus performers often receive laughter or applause for their efforts, punsters often draw an obligatory groan for theirs. But the fact that most people groan at, rather than laugh at, puns doesn’t mean that the punnery isn’t fu

I'm a dad and I like telling it, so I guess that's qualification enough. I heard this joke about 26 years ago, and I still laugh at it. Slightly long, so don't hate me.

A guy that lives alone decided that he wanted to get a pet. He went to a pet store in his city to see what was available. The man tells the associate at the store that he wants a pet, but he doesn't want an "ordinary" pet like a cat or dog, he wants something unique. The associate asks the man if he by chance has a swimming pool at his house, and the man replies that he indeed does have a pool. The associate says, "Great! I've got just the pet for you. Actually it is two pets -- two beautiful porpoises. And these aren't ordinary porpoises, either. They will never die, but there is one small catch. To keep them alive, once a year at noon on July 1, you have to feed each one of them an immature sea gull, before the birds have learned to fly." The associate tells the man that he shouldn't worry about the annual feeding, though, because the associate will always make sure he has two birds available for the man every year on July 1.

The man buys the pets, fills his swimming pool with salt water, and really enjoys the companionship of the porpoises throughout the year. On June 30, the man calls the pet store to make sure the two birds are available, and sure enough they are. The next day, he goes to the pet store at 10 a.m. to purchase the birds, and while he is inside the store he hears a lot of commotion coming from just outside the store. He goes to the front of the store to see what's going on outside, and he finds that there is a huge, ferocious lion trying to get into the store through the front door. Luckily, the door swings outward from the store, so the lion can't get it open. The police call the store associate to tell him what has happened. The main attraction (the lion) from the state zoo just up the road from the store had escaped, and the lion could sense all the small animals that were inside the pet store, so he was trying to get into the store to eat them. The police are waiting for the zoo's lion tamer to show up and get the animal back into captivity.

Meanwhile, the man who was at the store to buy the birds to feed to his pets was getting really anxious. He was trapped inside the store, there was no other exit, and the time was quickly approaching noon. The associate reminded the man that he absolutely had to feed his pets at precisely noon, otherwise th

He responded, "But I'm so attached to it!"

Thank you to my friend/coworker and her grandfather for having a sense of humor and not having an issue with me exploiting him for that sweet, sweet karma.

So while tutoring a Biology study group, (mind you, they are 18-20 year old guys and ladies I'm 24 and married) I was explaining a hard concept to the group, and a girl exclaimed: "Jesusdo, you're hard!" Because apparently I wasn't making too much sense...I responded with: "Thanks, but I prefer to receive that compliment from my wife though" That girl's face went redder than a tomato the same with everyone else's and much laughter was had. :)

Edit: autocorrect messed up my username.

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

So, I inherited my father's hilariously lame sense of humor and love of dad jokes. A few years ago I was Skyping with my parents and my mom was telling me how they would come home and find our cats up on the kitchen table laying on the laptop. She said something along the lines of "I wonder why they're doing it so much."

I responded (rather quickly, I might add) with "They're probably looking at kitty porn."

My dad was mad that he didn't think of it himself.