Stout Puns

Alliter o' rations.

Bartender: How is it? Me: It's cherry good!!! Friends: facepalm

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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

Co-workers were talking about going to a beer tasting this weekend. Here is how the conversation unfolded.

Coworker 1: They are show casing pale ales this time.

Coworker 2: When is their ales and stouts tasting?

CW1: Oh it was last weekend.

CW2: Damn, a stout sounds so good right now.

Me: Man, sounds like you really miss-stout.

Deafening silence.

I just came back from a holiday back to the UK to visit friends and family (am an expat).

While we were there we went to a nice community festival, with some great beers. An American friend of a friend proudly proclaimed that he’d bought a pint of red stout.

Looking up at the board, and seeing the name of the beer, my eyes lit up: a golden opportunity had just presented itself.

‘Nah mate, that’s not red stout, it’s called Red Stoat. You do know what a stoat is, right?

[confusion]

‘Well, it’s a little rodent, a bit like a weasel. You know how you can tell the difference between a stoat and a weasel?’

‘Er..’

‘Well’, I says, ‘a weasel is weasily identifiable, and a stoat is stoatally different.’

Cue a puzzled look on the guys face, and a moment’s silence, broken by me and my friend pissing ourselves laughing, not at the joke of course, but at his reaction.

So this was all very well and good, just another in the litany of bad jokes that floats in my wake, and I thought the story ended there.

Karma, however, had other plans…

A few days later, we’re up in the Lake District, walking back to the hotel after a pub dinner. As we’re walking down the road, we see a small carnivorous rodent dragging the recently deceased body of a rabbit back to its home. It was either a stoat, or a weasel, but you know what? I honestly had no way to tell which…