Through the Rain Puns

If it gets any worse, I guess I’ll have to let her in.

As a Boy Scout, we would camp a lot and go on hikes.

One night, we had to do a night hike, alone, for a merit badge. I had left the campsite about an hour earlier and a terrible storm rolled in. The sky opened up and the ground was quickly saturated. I tried to continue my hike for another few minutes, but it got cold and I was chilled and soaked to the bone, so I decided to try to head back to camp.

Lightning was starting to crackle above me, so I thought I should try to take a shortcut to make my hike back quicker. I pulled out my compass and found my direction, but the rain made it impossible to see more than five feet in front of me.

I was looking down at my compass, not paying any attention to where I was going, and suddenly felt weightless. The feeling didn't last long as I thumped down on slippery earth a second later.

I had fallen onto a ledge on the side of a rather steep cliff, the bottom of which was at least fifty feet down.

I sat there, contemplating on how to get back up this cliff as water rolled over the edge ten feet above me. There was nothing to grab onto to pull myself up. I was stuck there.

After a few minutes, I noticed the little ledge I was standing on was slowly getting smaller. The water was coming down so hard it was eroding the tiny bit of safety I had.

I dug through my pockets, thinking maybe I had something, anything, to help me out of my precarious situation. All I had was my compass, a cough drop, and a match. I was screwed.

So, I sat there, watching the edge of the ledge I was on get closer and closer to my feet, when suddenly I felt something pushing on my back.

I turned slightly and saw a wooden box sticking out of the cliff behind me. It was working its way out of the side, the rain surely helping it along. I tried to move away from it, but the ledge wasn't very wide and the box kept coming out, pushing me farther to the weak and failing edge.

As more of the box came out, to my horror, I realized it was a coffin! I had no idea how old it was, but it looked rather rotten. All I could think of was being pushed off this ledge, and the rotten coffin breaking and dropping a skeleton onto my broken and battered body at the bottom.

The coffin crept closer, my foot began to slip. I grabbed onto a root that was sticking out of the cliffside and dug in my pocket once more.

I hurriedly tore the wrapper off the cough drop and stuck it in my mouth. It stopped the coffin.

This joke has been told to me

There are three classes of cheerios, the lower class (plain ol' cheerios), the middle class cheerios (frosted), and the elite class (honey nut). One soggy morning in Seattle, a plain cheerio awoke in his single room apartment. He looked out at the still sleepy city, blanketed in a mist of rain. He quickly got dressed and put his shoes on, this would be the day. He stood propped against the bus stop, smoking a cigarette. "God I have got to stop this habit." He thought to himself. Glancing back and forth at the bustle of cheerios, he saw her. She looked about 25, devastatingly gorgeous, and he could smell the honey from where he stood. "Excuse me ma'am," his voice quivered, "I - I think you might be the most beautiful cheerio I have ever seen." She smiled and her otherwise golden brown face grew red. " This is a long shot, but will you marry me?' She was obviously caught off guard by this, but her red lips formed the word, "Yes." They raced through the morning mist of the city, and arrived at her fathers house. The cheerio bent down in front of her father. "Sir, I would like to ask for your blessing in marrying your daughter" "No! You are a regular cheerio and my daughter needs a high quality honey nut" he snapped. "But sir." "No means no damnit!" "Sir this is very unrea-" "You come back a honey nut and you'll have my blessing, my daughter is not about to marry a low life like you." The cheerio sprinted home, tears streaming down his face. He fumbled against the lock and sprawled out on his bed. When he awoke it was early, his sheets had a dark silhouette from his wet jacket. He sat up and lit a cigarette. "Damn." he sighed to himself. Walking in front of his mirror, he noticed something different. His body was frosted! He had become a frosted cheerio! He darted out the door without shoes, reaching the honey nut household in no time at all. He banged on the door, and the beauty's father answered. "Sir I am a changed cheerio! I'm frosted!" he exclaimed. Her father had a stern look on his face. "You think you are any better? The dirt on my boots are worth more than you." he hissed. The old honey nut slammed the door on the young frosted. He heard the deadbolt click. The newly frosted cheerio didn't take the same way home. He stood on the edge of a bridge, feeling the cool autumn wind on his sugar coated skin. Was he really going to go through with this? Was it worth it? No he was a frosted cheerio now. He couldn't get the girl, but he was a changed cheerio. He

I grew up in Vermont. Around my town were plenty of dairy farms, inviting the always wonderful manure aroma. An aroma that nearly forced my father to inhale deeply through his nose, saying, "Ah, fresh Vermont air!"

That's an excellent Dad one liner, as are most dad jokes, but he had another great one that I'm getting to.

You see, the hay bails we saw growing up in Vermont were mostly the cube variety. Hay bailing technology at the time created cubes of hay, so that's what dotted the fields they'd graze in.

As we grew older, we starting noticing the now more common round bails of hay. Dad was not pleased.

I asked him what the problem was or, at least, what his problem was with the round bails. The best jokes are set up when you ask for them.

So, he tells me. New farming technology allowed the round bails to be created more efficiently. They used less fuel in the bailers, took less passes on the field to gather the hay. They used less twine, and even though they didn't fill a truck as well as square bails, there was still a net monetary gain from the efficiency gained elsewhere.

However, studies were done on the bails. The cows approached them differently due to the different alignment of surface area. The way the rain hit the bails and rolled off as opposed to soaking in leached nutrients out of the hay. Some cows even mistook the shape of bail for another animal, and approached them so nervously that their heart rates were known to raise significantly; such a rate that a tinge of acidity could be tasted by those in the know in their milk.

What all of this amounted to... is that with the new round bails of hay, the cows just weren't getting a good square meal.

My dad's favorite joke of all time (there are many variations, and of course, even more extended versions):

These three guys went to South America to explore the rain forest. The guide was leading them through explaining the different plants and animals. After awhile they started to hear this really loud sound.

whoosh

whoosh

whoosh

The men, kind of scared, asked the guide what the noise was.

"What the hell is that noise?"

"Oh, that's just the Foo bird."

"The Foo bird?"

"Yes, it's a giant bird, and the locals believe that if it poops on you, wiping it off will cause instant death."

"That's silly."

"Well, that's what the locals say."

The noise gets louder and closer.

WHOOSH

WHOOSH

WHOOSH

The men look up in the sky and see a glimpse of the Foo bird.

"It's huge!"

Suddenly...

SPLAT

All four of the men are covered with bird shit. The guide pulls a cloth out of his pocket and wipes the shit off of his face. He drops dead.

The first of the three men says, "that's got to be a coincidence."

He wipes the shit off, and drops dead.

The second guy nervously says, "it can't be true"

He wipes it off and drops dead.

The third guy doesn't wipe it off. He was found a few days later, and went home, refusing to be cleaned.

A few years pass, his life has been destroyed due to being covered in shit. His wife left him, his friends won't come near him, he can't find a job... One day, he's in the bathroom shaving around the shit.

"It's been years, most of it has flaked off, it's probably fine to wipe it off now."

He hesitates, but eventually grabs a towel, wets it down, and takes a deep breath.

He wipes the shit off, looks up into the mirror smiling, then drops dead.

The moral of the story is:

If the Foo shits, wear it.

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