Anyone Who Knows What Love Is Puns

Once upon a time there was a pirate captain who was the most amazing best captain a crew could ever ask for. His crew loved him more than anything and would do absolutely anything for him.

One day as they were sailing, a crew member In the crows nest shouts, “one ship off the port side!” Immediately the captain yells at his crew, “Men! Bring me my red shirt!”

Slightly confused, the men hesitate for a second and then hurry off to bring the captain his red shirt. Amazingly they win the battle!

The men are so happy and thankful their captain brought them safely through the battle they don’t even care why the captain wanted his red shirt.

A few months of sailing some more, again the man in the crows nest yells, “Two ships off the port side!” Quickly the captain screams, “Men! Bring me my red shirt!” The crew doesn’t hesitate this time to get him his red shirt and what do you know? They win this battle too!!

The crew is astounded at their captains awesomeness!!! They honestly could not find anyone better. This time though the crew stops a moment and asks the captain, “Why do you always have us bring you your red shirt?”

The captain replies, “Well men, if I get stabbed the blood will blend into my red shirt and it will look like I’m not hurt so that you will all fight as hard as if I were still alive.”

The men can’t believe what they hear! How could they be so lucky as to have a captain so incredibly smart and courageous??!!

Two seconds later, “TWENTY SEVEN SHIPS OFF THE PORT SIDE!!!!!!!”

Calmly, with an even tone, the captain says, “Men, bring me my brown pants.”

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