Raising The Quality Of Puns

A director and a costume designer had a disagreement over a critical shot in the horror movie they were filming in their studio.

The director planned to use CGl for a brief but critical reveal-shot of the movie's monster. But the costume designer insisted they use an actual costume instead of CGl.

"CGl makes a movie look cheap these days," she proclaimed.

The two of them continued debating until they began arguing. The stage crew, actors on break, and other people around them began watching until both the costume designer and director were shouting over each other at the top of their lungs. Despite their efforts, nobody could calm them down.

Fearing the incident may lead to blows, one of cameramen called a studio security guard in urgent request. The guard arrived a minute later and made a beeline for the director and costume designer, who were being held back by multiple people on set.

"lt's my movie. l make the decisions!" the director hollered, hoarse and red in the eyes.

"The movie quality will suffer!" the costume designer screamed, hair plastered across her sweaty face.

The security guard stepped in-between them and raised his pistol at the ceiling without a word. They continued to argue around him. There was a bark of gunshot, then nothing but silence and some falling plaster.

"Now see here," the guard said loudly, stepping back to look at the two of them. "Either you two quit your bickering or l'll have to escort you off the premises. You're making a scene."

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