L Moments Puns

My brother’s wife has been pregnant for five months and decided that they wanted to reveal the gender of the baby at our family reunion of about 40 people.

One night, after just finishing up a BBQ, my brother and his wife stand up and announce to the family that they are going to have a little baby girl. Everyone starts cheering, naturally.

Once the cheers die down a little I shout out, “Do you have a name for the baby yet?”

My brother replies, “Yeah. Liana Noelle.”

Everyone starts to “Ooohhh” and “Ahhhh” and proclaim how pretty of a name it is.

Then after a moment I shout, “How the hell are you supposed to spell Liana with no L?”

There were lots of L's.

[I pulled this one on my wife as we were rummaging through the display looking for the right letters for our guests' first names. I was afraid the joke was too obtuse, but bright girl that she is, she got it right away. She gave me a wonderful eye roll and said, "You had to go there, huh?" Our kids are in college now so we're empty-nesters, but I can still have a proud dadjoke moment sometimes.]

(This joke just deserved a more catchy title, sorry for the mess.)

Every Tuesday growing up, we had German sausages and sauerkraut for dinner - my dad's favorite. Since I can remember, my dad has told this joke and never misses a chance telling it till this day:

"You know kids, it's not the sausage that makes you fat, it's the sauce!"

Both my younger sister and l looked at eachother, rolled our eyes and thought - why is he telling this joke every single time.. it doesnt make sense! There is no sauce here! Only fried sausages, sauerkraut and potatoes. In fact, where is the goddamn sauce, we could need it. This dish is dry as shit! My poor mom shrugged her shoulders, seemingly just as confused.

When i was about 11-12, I caught up on my dad's hinting and eye contact after the punch line.. he wanted me to get the joke so bad at this point lol. I had a moment, as they say. Oh... OOHH. BOOM. Omg the "SAUCE"!! From the sausage.. makes some people fat.. as in pregnant.. Mind. Blown.

My sister, around 8 at that time, had a few hundred more sausage dinners to "ketchup" ;) I'm not doing so bad myself, 'ey?

Edit: For the slow people out there, this joke is about sausage=penis, sauce=sperm and getting fat=pregnant. Did you have your moment too?? Admittingly, the joke works better in my native language, but you get the idea.

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

My brother’s wife has been pregnant for five months and decided that they wanted to reveal the gender of the baby at our family reunion of about 40 people.

One night, after just finishing up a BBQ, my brother and his wife stand up and announce to the family that they are going to have a little baby girl. Everyone starts cheering, naturally.

Once the cheers die down a little I shout out, “Do you have a name for the baby yet?”

My brother replies, “Yeah. Liana Noelle.”

Everyone starts to “Ooohhh” and “Ahhhh” and proclaim how pretty of a name it is.

Then after a moment I shout, “How the hell are you supposed to spell Liana with no L?”

Edit (10/22/2014): Probably won't be seen or noticed by anyone, but my baby niece was just born today! She's on the opposite side of the country, but I can't wait to meet her!