PUN

PUN, also paronomasia [Stress: ‘pa-ro-no-MAY-si-a’].

1. The conflating of HOMONYMS and near-homonyms to produce a humorous effect: (in speech and writing) Is life worth living?—It depends on the liver; (in speech alone) At his funeral, four of his drinking companions carried the bier/beer.

2. A comparable play on words and phrases with similar sounds, sometimes requiring the (often forced) adaptation of one word or phrase to fit the other: My wife's gone to the West Indies.—Jamaica? (Did you make her?)—No, it was her own idea. In the 16–17c, puns were common among dramatists and writers. In SHAKESPEARE's Romeo and Juliet, when Mercutio is dying, he says, ‘Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man.’ In Macbeth, when Lady Macbeth plans to incriminate King Duncan's attendants in his murder, she says: ‘If he do bleed, I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal, for it must seem their guilt (gilt).’ On this liberal approach to puns, Ernest Gowers has observed (in his 1965 edition of Henry Fowler's Modern English Usage): ‘Now that we regard puns merely as exercises in jocularity, and a pretty debased form even of that, we are apt to be jarred by the readiness of Shakespeare's characters to make them at what seem to us most unsuitable moments.’

The pun lost status in English, despite (or perhaps because of) a wealth of homonyms. In the 18c, Joseph Addison considered puns false wit, and increasingly since then critics have taken the same view. Currently, puns are widely considered so low a form of wit that they prompt a ritual groan, but despite this apparent disapproval the pun continues to thrive. They are, for example, common as a means of attracting attention in journalism and commerce: (1) In newspaper headlines: Honoring a Pole Apart (Time, Oct, 1980), on Nobel Prize winner Czesław Misłosz; Rejoycing with the Ulysses set (International Herald Tribune, 22 June 1984), on James Joyce's novel Ulysses; Regimental ties (Observer, 6 Oct. 1985), a title for reviews of military books. (2) In the names of businesses: Lettuce Entertain You (a restaurant); Curl Up and Dye (a hair stylist); Molly's Blooms (a Dublin florist, playing on the name of the Joycean character Molly Bloom). Part of the problem of the pun, however, is straining for effect, working with near-puns rather than with puns properly so called: as the woman said when she received greenery instead of flowers, ‘with fronds like these, who needs anemones?’ See DOUBLE MEANING, HUMOUR, JOURNALESE, PLAYING WITH WORDS.