he's here to stay for a while, taking college courses and trying to learn the nuances of the f'd up language that we all know and love, english! the particular topic of today's lesson? the pun.
go ahead - try to describe... well, it's when you say a word that fits the context of what you just said in a different (often hilarious, sometimes really bad) way. needless to say, he didn't get it. we need an example. who's got one off hand? these pun things are nearly impossible to describe and way difficult to throw out on command. if you ever need a pun on the fly, here's what i said & here you go:
"so this guy's arrested for standing up in church and exposing himself. guy's now in court and my friend - the judge's law clerk - is listening to the attorney describe the incident and defend guy. clerk thinks to himself and later expresses to me 'i wish i had the balls to do that.'"
a pun.
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ok so wikipedia sorta disagrees with me & i don't like it:
A pun (or paronomasia) is a phrase that deliberately exploits confusion between similar words for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious {puns should never be serious!}. For example, the sentence "the world is perspiring against me" is a pun on the paranoid's motto "the world is conspiring against me", that exploits the similarity between "conspiring" and "perspiring" {not funny}.
A pun may also exploit confusion between two senses of the same written or spoken word, due to homophony, homography, homonymy, polysemy, or metaphorical usage. As Walter Redfern succinctly said: "To pun is to treat homonyms as synonyms"[1]. By definition, puns must be deliberate; an involuntary substitution of similar words is called a malapropism.
Puns are arguably the simplest and oldest form of word play, and are popular in all languages (although some people claim that that they are easier to construct in some languages than others).
hmmmm. i still like mine.
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