Intonations Puns

Surrounded by his son, his twin daughters and a haggard-looking nurse who looked about ready to end it all if only she could find the bloody switch, he was finally breathing his last.

His son, who loved him dearly and wasn't at all sure if he had been cut out of the will or not, burst into tears at the plight of a man who would look more at home in a red woolly outfit than he ever could in drab, white linen.

"I do not wish to die today, Anthony", he intoned fixing his gaze slightly above his son's left shoulder, "there is something you must do to save me."

"Tell me what to do dad, I can't bear to look at you this way", cried Anthony.

"There is a land, not far from here, where no one ever dies. It is not for dying you see. That is where I must go."

"Where is this place father? Tell me, and I shall take you to it."

"Take me there now", he said faintly as if in great pain, "Take me to, The Living Room."

Does that make one "intonational?"

My son asked me "Where's the chili powder?"

I replied "Right next to the Argentina powder."

To his credit, he slitted his eyes and intoned "I said 'chill-EE' powder, not 'chill-AY' powder, Dad."

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