We Didn't Start the Fire 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

Once upon a time there were three little pigs, Pork Chop, Hambone, and Bacon.

The boys lived at home with their mother. One day their mother said, “I no longer have enough food to feed you boys, you need to go out on your own and find your fortunes.”

Not wanting to upset their mother they left the house together to seek their fortunes.

Several miles into their journey Bacon, the little pig everyone liked best, said, “Let’s build our houses here! This seems like a great place to start making our fortunes.”

Pork Chop and Hambone agreed. So they all began building their houses.

Pork Chop, the laziest of the bunch, decided to build his house out of straw, which he apparently stole from a nearby field. It was not a very sturdy building material, but Pork Chop didn’t care. All he wanted to do was play all day, and he didn’t want to spend too much time building.

Hambone was willing to work a bit harder and he decided to build his house out of sticks which he procured by de-limbing every tree within a 300 meter radius of their homestead.

Hambone and Pork Chop were happy. Now all they had to do was to play and sleep the rest of the day.

Now Bacon was a hard worker. He knew that his brothers had used bad materials and shoddy construction methods and he wanted to build the best house he could. He found several tons of bricks stacked in neatly ordered pallets in the forest which he decided to use for his building material. It took him several days, but when he was done Bacon had the best house on the homestead.

The next day a wolf, Scott Howard, happened upon the pig brothers and their new homestead. He spied the straw house and smelled Pork Chop inside and began to think to himself that Pork Chop would make a mighty fine meal, so Scott went and knocked on the door.

Scott said, “Little Pig! Little Pig! Let me in!”

Pork Chop replied, “No way José! Not by the hairs on my chinny chin chin!”

Scott, undeterred by the reply says, “Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your crappy straw house to the ground!”

Scott began to huff and puff. He was evidently having some sort of asthma attack, but after a few tugs from his handy dandy rescue inhaler, he was able to muster enough wind to blow Pork Chops straw house to the ground.

Pork Chop narrowly escaped Scott’s massive jaws. Scared, and now homeless, Pork Chop ran for the nearest shelter he could see. Hambone’s house.

Scott, undeterred, chased Pork Chop to his new hiding place. Scott was very pleas

“We didn’t start the fire”

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