Relative Key Puns

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

A few weeks ago I stayed at my dad's house. In the morning I found I had forgotten my keys and therefore had locked myself in. Because I didn't want to get told off/mocked by my dad, I phoned my brother's girlfriend to go to my brother at his work, retrieve the key from him and bring it back to dad's house to let me out. The following week my brother (the traitor) told my dad about this escapade and dad phoned me to mock me and tell me that not only was there a spare key in the house already, dad just happened to be driving past the house when I left anyway so could've let me out himself...

These are some of the key-related puns since then.

> me: dad, I didn't get the job in [city]

> dad: don't worry, it wasn't a key position.

Today in the restaurant we ate at: oh look! They do KEY lime pie!

Dude turns his head to look at me as dad and I walk down the road together: oooh! He looked keen. Geddit? Keen? KEY-n

> me: okay dad, you can stop with the key jokes now.

> dad makes the motion of sealing his lips and locking them with a key, immediately bursting into fits of giggles before he says: nah I think this joke has many more possibilities to unlock. more laughter

So many groans...

Ninja edit: something went funny with the submit page...