I’ve been busting to write this newsletter for weeks now, but events keep overtaking me. Who can write about puns when the world’s burning and people are going tribal over words to do with race, gender and whatever else they can find to harden their hearts against other human beings?
The reason I’ve been busting is about as shallow as it gets: I’ve invented what I believe is the world’s shortest joke: it’s a pun, it’s a gem, and I want to share it with you so I can bask in what I assume will be your unfettered adulation while I await the inevitable call from Guinness World Records. As an added bonus, if you like the joke you can also order the t-shirt.
But since gratification delayed is all the greater, let’s delve into the history of this little word first, and I’m going to do that by asking you a question. If you had to name one literary figure from the last 500 years who mastered punning above all others, who would it be?
I’m guessing you said Shakespeare (you might have said Joyce, and I wouldn’t argue if you did). But if you said Shakespeare, here’s a trivial fact that may amuse you: the word pun isn’t recorded in English until the 1660s, forty or so years after his death.
Now before you go trawling through the 850,000-odd words in Shakespeare’s plays, I can inform you there is a line in Troilus and Cressida (Act II, Scene I) where Thersites states, “He would pun thee into shivers with his fist, as a sailor breaks a biscuit.” But pun here is another word for pound, so it doesn’t count.
English essayist Joseph Addison, who lived about 100 years after Shakespeare, defined a pun as “a Conceit arising from the use of two Words that agree in the Sound, but differ in the Sense”. Leaving aside the compulsion to capitalise every noun in case the reader mistakes them for adjectives or verbs, that’s as good a definition as we need here. No one is sure where the word came from, but one theory is that it may be a shortening of Italian puntiglio, “equivocation, trivial objection,” itself a diminutive of the Latin punctum or “point” (hence words like punctilious, punctual and punctuation). The only problem with the theory is that it lacks supporting evidence, which means it’s certain to be spouted as indisputable fact somewhere during an upcoming election cycle in you-know-where.
Though you may find this hard to believe, there have been times in history when punning was the epitome of wit. In fact, for about 500 years from around 1100, any writer worth their salt made a point of showing their chops in this respect.
Shakespeare was no ordinary master of the art; he revelled in smutty innuendoes and didn’t mind if the character voicing them was in the depths of despair. When Juliet is about to stab herself and cries, “oh happy dagger! This is thy sheath”, the crowd would have got the reference in an instant.
Why would the world’s greatest playwright get so down and dirty? In the words of Dara Lind from vox.com, “if you're reading or watching a Shakespeare play, and you're not imagining the actors standing in front of a mosh pit of jeering Londoners waiting to throw vegetables at the stage, you're doing it wrong.”
Happily for punning, Shakespeare’s retirement has seen dads the world over keep the art alive, a task they typically perform with relish, if not the same finesse.
I myself am inordinately proud of inventing what I believe to be the world’s shortest joke which also happens to be a pun. Here it is: Flotilla the pun.
As promised, you can wear this pun on your person by purchasing the t-shirt here. Allow 2-3 weeks for delivery.
Shakespeare, eat your heart out.
Bits and specious
A debate is taking place in biology about the use of eponyms to name species such as Bachman’s warbler. Because many older names are from white colonialists who did bad things, many feel the time is right to change those species’ names to something less contentious. But as so often happens with language debates, things aren’t as simple as they might seem.
Following the recent death of the inimitable Cormac McCarthy, one of my writing clients sent me a link to an article he’d written a few years ago on how to write a great science article. Whether you’re a science writer or not, it’s well worth reading.
While we’re talking science, debate is under way in New Zealand about a draft school science curriculum that makes no explicit mention of biology, chemistry or physics. Defenders of the draft (and it’s worth emphasising it is just a draft at this stage) argue that science facts without context don’t support student learning. What’s needed, they say, is study that places science within the realm of real world problems. I’m far from convinced that the proposed approach is adequate, but one thing I do agree with is that science teaching may no longer be fit for modern needs. In that vein, here’s a seminal 2011 paper on that subject by one of New Zealand’s foremost scientists, Sir Peter Gluckman. It has the wonderful virtue of containing things that are likely to piss off people from both sides of this debate.
Quote of the week
A pun is the lowest form of humor, unless you thought of it yourself.
Doug Larson