How The Universe Works Puns

OK... so did you ever notice how every time you spend 4 days alone in the woods and you make it out without a scratch or even a mosquito bite, and you're feeling all peaceful and relaxed and at one with the universe, you're not home 20 minutes and unloading the back of your truck when you slam your right shin into the trailer hitch... and amid the flashing white stars around you, your fists clench, your teeth grit, your body tenses and every "mean, nasty and ugly" word you ever read, heard, uttered or even imagined ("Wait... is #*&%#@!!! even a word??? Oh what the heck? It works!") goes tearing through your brain.... and eventually it passes and you keep working, surprised you're not even limping and it doesn't hurt more than it does... and almost an hour later, when you're finished and getting undressed to take your first hot shower in days, you see a lump on your shin the size of Rhode Island... and the first image that pops into your head is John Merrick yelling "I AM NOT AN ANIMAL!!!... in fact, it literally looks like a second knee on your right leg... so you spend the rest of the evening keeping it elevated and icing it on and off, alternating between a blue gel pack and a bag of frozen peas.... and when you go to bed, you keep the gel pack on while you read and then take it off before you go to sleep... and then you wake up around 3AM and decide to check your shin and the swelling has gone down quite a bit... but since you still have several hours before you get up, you decide to ice it again... but the gel pack on the floor is no longer cold so you get up, walk to the kitchen and open the fridge... and after taking a bite of leftover pizza from last night (because... well, you're here and what the heck?), you go into the freezer, grab the bag of frozen peas and take them back to bed with you... but they're all frozen into one big solid ball and well, that won't do... so you lay the bag on the bed to pound it once or twice to break them up, but instead the bag bursts open and suddenly there are frozen peas sprayed all over the bed and rolling onto the floor... and all those words from yesterday come rushing back into your head as you kneel to gather them all up... but suddenly your anger completely vanishes and you can't help laughing to yourself as you think, "gee, I can't remember the last time I pea'd the bed in the middle of the night"???

For awhile there in university, I worked as an appetizer cook for a higher end restaurant. At the end of some shifts I'd make use of the staff discount and cook up some calamari or make a sushi roll for myself.

Sometimes my GF (now wife) would join me in this post-shift snack. When she would ask something equivalent to, "How was your shift?" I'd often respond mid-bite and say in a snooty French accent, "I ate my work!" She's been groaning for almost 20 years now.

So a few of us guys and some gals are working at a site for a university show. A couple of the girls wanted to learn how to use power tools, so we taught them. After a few minutes, one of the girls says:

girl: wow this really is a lot of work just for a hole...

to which I reply: THAT'S WHAT IV'E BEEN SAYING!!

everyone laughed, but I sincerely felt bad for that one... thought you guys might get a kick outta it too!

Fiancee left for work without glasses, asks me to get them.

Enter the university coffee shop she works at, and hand her the glasses, saying loud enough for everyone to hear,

"You left these at my place last night"

and left, without another word.

Hour later on her break, she texts me, calling me an ass, and how she got such looks and snickers. It was wonderful.

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