The New English Weekly Puns

And he was a very talented guitarist, so good in fact that one day his friend the chicken turned to him and asked would he like to be in a band with him. The horse of course agreed he and the chicken who played the drums went looking for a singer and a bassist. They decided to approach the Sheep who was the best singer on the farm, the Sheep agreed and told them about how the Pig was a pretty good bass player so they all asked him to join the band and he agreed.

So The Barnyard Animals got to work practicing and rehearsing their little hearts out. They started playing open mic nights and gained some traction. After a few years they managed to get signed by a major record label and The Barnyard Animals became an international phenomenon. They toured in every country for the better part of a decade until they finally decided retire. The Horse decided to settle down in English countryside, the Chicken went to Australia, the Pig went to Japan and the Sheep went to New Zealand.

A few years later Gary Barlow contacts the Horse about getting The Barnyard Animals back together for a big charity Live Aid type concert in Wembley. The Horse contacts his band mates and they all agree. So the Pig, the Sheep and the Chicken all fly out to Singapore and get the same connection to London. But in a terrible turn of events the plane crashes and all The Barnyard Animals apart from the horse die in a fiery inferno.

The horse upon finding out that his oldest friends have all died goes into a deep depression. He locks himself in his house and tries to drink his pain away. A few weeks later when every bottle of anything that could be drank had been drunk. He puts on his hat and sunglasses so no one would be able to recognise him and heads to the closest pub. So the Horse walks into a bar and the barman says "Hey, why the long face?"

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