Site Investigation Puns

The evidence wasn't concrete.

It looked like foul play. The mason wasn’t a suspect. He had a concrete alibi. The night of the accident he said he was with his girlfriend. She confirmed this. There was a wall of evidence. Consequently his alibi was rock solid and not just a facade. There was damning evidence that it was the plumber. They figured his alibi, that he was at the casino, wouldn’t hold water. But cameras showed fluid betting all night. This, obviously, threw a wrench in the investigation. The investigators followed a lead to the electrician. He had a shocking secret. It seems the electrician had been charged with battery only months earlier. But it was a dead end. They looked at the HVAC installer, but his alibi was airtight. Next, they tried to nail the Roofer, as he had been spouting off about the victim the day of the accident. But the roofer had been hammered all day. There was no way they could paint him as the cunning mastermind.

Then they saw the writing on the wall: the painter had both motive and opportunity. He was seen canvassing the accident site a few strokes before midnight when the accident occurred. The victim fell off a faulty ladder that was covered in finger paint. It seems the victim and the painter had a few brush-ins before. And it wasn’t a pretty picture. The painter was indicted, but despite all the evidence, the charges didn’t stick and the jury let him roll off clean.

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