Creative Puns

[Someone sent me this email so I thought anyone into Word Humor would enjoy it! - Thanks to Melissa]
1. The roundest knight at King Arthur’s Round Table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.
2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.
3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.
4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated in an algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.
5. The butcher backed into the meat grinder and got a little behind in his work.
6. No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery.
7. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.
8. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.
9. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.
10. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
11. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.
12. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
13. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other, “You stay here, I’ll go on a head.”
14. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
15. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said, “Keep off the Grass.”
16. A small boy swallowed some coins and was taken to a hospital. When his grandmother telephoned to ask how he was, a nurse said, “No change yet.”
17. A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.
18. The short fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.
19. The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.
20 A backward poet writes inverse.
21. In a democracy, it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism, it’s your count that votes.
22. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.
23. Don’t join dangerous cults, practice safe sects!

Webster and New World Words

Noah Webster himself used these alternate spellings in his first dictionary, many in an attempt to get people to use the shorter forms for convenience; he was rejected in each case.

Booty for beauty.........Soop for soup
Bred for bread.............Wimmen for women (still used in the south!)
Groop for group...........Tuf for tough (I’m for this one!)
Hed for head................Bilt for built
Tung for tongue...........Deef for deaf
Heerd for heard...........Nater for nature
Voloom for volume.....Thum for thumb (why the b, one wonders?)

Fantom for phantom – apparently sometimes this worked, as in fantasy (previously phantasy), other times the f for ph was rejected.

Webster also cleaned up the Bible for the insanely puritanical, re-writing such obscenities as testicles as “peculiar members”. Didn’t he realize that “testament” and “testimony” both came from testicles, for men swore on the family jewels in those days, the Bible not having been printed yet? Should testament therefore be “peculiar memberment”? When Onan spilled his seed, to Webster he “frustrated his purpose”.

Yankee, by the way, is a corruption of the Dutch Jan Kees, which means “John Cheese”, so apparently there were cheeseheads (i.e., Green Bay Packers’ fans) back in pioneer days. Now, at the Varsity in Atlanta, a “Yankee dog” is a dog with just mustard (in Mexico, it’s a “tourista”). If they knew the origin of Yankee, it would have to include john cheese on the dog.

One renowned linguist, Dr. W.C. Minor, who contributed a vast number of words to the first Oxford English Dictionary, a 12-volume compendium that attempted to be a complete and exhaustive encyclopedia of English, could not attend a conference of the contributors due to incarceration in a hospital for the criminally insane. His paranoia was a morbid fear of Irishmen, and when he finally was released and did go to England in 1871, he killed an innocent bystander that he thought was stalking him.

Hooch came from the Indian tribe Hoochinoo, noted for their homemade liquor. Nearly half of our state names came from Indian words, but only a few dozen words remain from Native Americans, notably canoe, hammock, and tobacco, while squash, hickory, and raccoon were shortened from longer, nearly unpronounceable words. Some compound words created in the New World are catfish, mockingbird, grasshopper, bullfrog, eggplant, rattlesnake.

“Ok” (for “okay”, which sounds like “oak hay”) was also a New World creation, along with hornswaggle, cattawampus, and rambunctious. OK was not in widespread usage (having first appeared in print in Boston in 1839) and may have died out but for the presidential campaign of Martin Van Buren, whose nickname was “Old Kinderhook”. Democrats organized the Democratic O.K. Club and the phrase was used as a campaign slogan in 1840. It is most likely an abbreviation for the illiterate “oll korrect”, used by President Andrew Johnson (along with O.W. for “oll wright”, both used jokingly), but the real origins are obscure and have been often debated. ok by me..

Bad Translations

A computer was once asked to translate “out of sight, out of mind” into other languages and back into English, and came up with “blind insanity”.

Due to English confusion, an Italian film with English subtitles had a policeman asking a motorist for a sweater – a “pullover”, get it?

In a Spanish film, a man asking “if he could bring a date to a funeral” was translated into “if he could bring a fig to the funeral.” (date = fig, or some such fruit… rather than “a companion of the opposite gender for possible romantic interaction”)


A sign in a park somewhere in Asia

A Congressman once told a Joint National Committee on Languages in 1988 that “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me.” He’d better be learning Aramaic and Hebrew and giving up pork as well!

The Oxford English Dictionary sells as much in Japan as in America, each one third more than in England.