Collective Excitation Puns

I handed her the dictionary.

A little boy named Tom was approaching his 3rd birthday, and absolutely adored the show "Tractor Tom", partially because of his name being spoken, and partially because he loved tractors.

As the day drew nearer, his parents decided to buy him a toy tractor as a gift. The rest of his toys were gone with the wind at this point, as Tom spent all his waking hours playing with this one tractor toy.

Fast forward a few years, and Tom's now approaching his 10th birthday, with his love for tractors intact and intensified. His parents discuss what to get for him, and decide that a ride-on tractor to replace his bike is the best gift they can give him.

Tom absolutely loves the gift, and spends all of his time out of school riding around the neighbourhood while his bike collects dust in the garage.

We come forward a few more years, as Tom approaches his 18th birthday, with an only intensified adoration of tractors. His father pulls him aside on the morning of his birthday, saying "Now son, I know that we've promised you a car, but we know what you really want."

He leads him outside, to a brand new tractor with a bow on it, saying that this is his welcome to adulthood.

Tom is beyond excited, and spends the next few months going everywhere in his tractor - grocery trips, bars, classes, friends' houses.....

Again, a few years later, Tom is driving down a back country road, in the middle of nowhere, with his tractor, in the middle of a storm. The tractor breaks down, and with no air conditioning or any form of modern comforts, Tom is in a miserable mood until someone finally comes past for him to flag down for help. After this, Tom realises that although tractors are fun, maybe they're not the best transport method out there.

Tom ages through a few more years, and finds himself driving down another road in the middle of nowhere in his car, and sees a house on fire just off the road. Being a good samaritan, he pulls over and heads up the driveway to a woman running out of the house screaming "Please, help, help! My baby is trapped in there! Go and call 911, please!"

Tom turns around, then, before leaving, has a brainwave.

He turns back and walks towards the flames, saying "Don't worry, ma'am, I've got this."

He takes a deep breath in, and the fire disappears into nothingness. As you'd expect, the woman is in awe, and asks, "Oh my God, how did you do that?!"

Tom simply responds, "Well you see ma'am, I'm an extractor fan."

Several years ago, a bunch of college friends were visiting me in NY during Columbus Day weekend. My parents offer to drive us into NYC, and on the way my father points out a huge cemetery. "Hey, do you know who's buried there?" My father asked. "Who?" We all asked excitedly. "Dead people." Cue collective groans and "God damnit..."

My grandfather was a farmer and he loved getting dressed up every year for the local fair and exhibiting his prize chickens.

For this occasion, my grandmother would spend the entire year searching through thrift shops looking for silly neckties for him to wear, and she loved finding ones with chickens on them.

When he died a couple of years ago, he bequeathed them to me in his will. When my grandmother handed me the bag full of them, my eyes welled with tears and I smiled thinking about my grandfather looking in the mirror and straightening his tie.

Why am I telling you all of this back story? Because the last time I tried to tell this to someone and I didn't give context, they thought it was weird that I was so excited about inheriting my dead grandfather's hen tie collection.

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