Strange as It Seems Puns

There once was a man who had a job driving a passenger train between two large towns. It could be a very dull job to some, but as the old saying goes, one man's trash is another's gold; he wanted to be a railroad man since he was a boy.

He was a wiz behind the controls of the train, and commanded the 15 car vehicle effortlessly as if he had been born to do the job. He prided himself on the fact that he could bend the rules and speed through curves and grades that made other motormen shiver and back off.

One day however, he wasn't so lucky and came round a bend too fast and derailed his train. He backed off the throttle and braked as much as he could, managing to only have one fatality out of 500 passengers on his train.

Months later there was a trial and he was found guilty of manslaughter in the highest degree, a capital offence in that land, and sentenced to die by electric chair. Punishment came swift, unlike most places, and 3 days after sentencing the former railroader was asked for his last meal.

"I'll have a banana," "Just a single banana?" said the perplexed guard. "The warden will grant you a feast and all you want is that?"

"Just a single banana." he said.

After he downed the fruit, he was strapped into the electric chair an hour later.... The warden hit the switch, lights flickered, and the crackle of electricity could be heard for over a minute...

...but our train jockey instead rose from the chair looking more like he got a stiff massage, rather than be put to death! Well in that nation, the law of the land states that if a man somehow survives being put to death, they must be set free...

...And so it came to pass that our engineer was let go...

And for whatever reason, he got his job back!

So he was back railroading again doing the job that he loved. You'd think he'd have been more cautious with this second chance he'd been given, but you'd also be wrong. Speedy Gonzales with a train license decided to gun his locomotive to hard and send it off the tracks again!

Of course, this time he was tried for the same crime, but at a different time (his was a fair commonwealth and double indemnity was simply unheard of!) So fair was their nation, that the jury came up with the same judgement and punishment. So three days later, when asked for his last meal, the engineer simply said "I'll have 2 bananas..."

Not less than 60 minutes after consuming the last morsel was he strapped into the chair and the switch thrown... And....

NOTHING.

We decided to visit the Paul. W Bryant Museum before the game. The museum is essentially just a building full of the history of Alabama college football including National Championship trophies and all that. I happened to notice that there were lots of Tennessee fans walking around the museum as well which seemed a bit odd to me.

Me: Dad, why are there so many Tennessee fans walking around in here? It seems strange.

Dad: Well son, they want to see what a trophy looks like.

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