A pun (also known as paronomasia) is a figure of speech which consists of a deliberate confusion of similar words within a phrase or phrases for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious.
A pun can rely on the assumed equivalency of multiple similar words (homonymy), of different shades of meaning of one word (polysemy), or of a literal meaning with a metaphor.
Bad puns are sometimes called "cheesy".
Walter Redfern (in Puns, Blackwell, London, 1984) succinctly said: "To pun is to treat homonyms as synonyms." For example, a pun is used in the sentence "There is nothing punny about bad puns." The pun takes place in the deliberate confusion of the implied word "funny" by the substitution of the word "punny", a homophone of "funny".
In order to be able to pun effectively it is necessary that a language must include homonyms which may readily be misrepresented as synonyms. Languages with complex gender or case structures tend not to facilitate this, although puns can be constructed in all languages with varying degrees of difficulty; that is, puns are said to be easy to construct in languages such as Chinese or English, but rarer in Russian.
Examples:
The mortician was late for dinner because he was buried in his work.
2. The only similarity between ancient times and the 1970's is that both were full of people getting stoned.
3. Did you hear about the vet that had to prescribe Viagra to the alligator? It had reptile dysfunction.
4. It's only fitting that it's tailors who pull the wool over our eyes.
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A pun (also known as paronomasia) is a figure of speech which consists of a deliberate confusion of similar words within a phrase or phrases for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious.
A pun can rely on the assumed equivalency of multiple similar words (homonymy), of different shades of meaning of one word (polysemy), or of a literal meaning with a metaphor.
Bad puns are sometimes called "cheesy".
Walter Redfern (in Puns, Blackwell, London, 1984) succinctly said: "To pun is to treat homonyms as synonyms." For example, a pun is used in the sentence "There is nothing punny about bad puns." The pun takes place in the deliberate confusion of the implied word "funny" by the substitution of the word "punny", a homophone of "funny".
In order to be able to pun effectively it is necessary that a language must include homonyms which may readily be misrepresented as synonyms. Languages with complex gender or case structures tend not to facilitate this, although puns can be constructed in all languages with varying degrees of difficulty; that is, puns are said to be easy to construct in languages such as Chinese or English, but rarer in Russian.
Examples:
The mortician was late for dinner because he was buried in his work.
2. The only similarity between ancient times and the 1970's is that both were full of people getting stoned.
3. Did you hear about the vet that had to prescribe Viagra to the alligator? It had reptile dysfunction.
4. It's only fitting that it's tailors who pull the wool over our eyes.
If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow
that:
electricians can be delighted,
musicians denoted,
cowboys deranged,
models deposed,
dry cleaners depressed,
bed makers debunked,
baseball players debased,
teachers declassified,
bulldozer operators degraded,
organ donors delivered,
software engineers detested,
underwear makers debriefed, and
musical composers decomposed?
On a more positive note, though, perhaps we can hope that politicians