Tweet
PUN (also called paranomasia): A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning. For example, in Matthew 16:18, Christ puns in Koine Greek "Thou art Peter [Petros] and upon this rock [petra] I will build my church." Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet, puns upon Romeo's vile death (vile=vial, the vial of poison Romeo consumed). Shakespeare's poetic speaker also puns upon his first name (Will) and his lover's desire (her will) in the sonnets, and John Donne puns upon his last name in "Hymn to God the Father." Originally, puns were a common literary trope in serious literature, but after the eighteenth century, puns have been primarily considered a low form of humor. A specific type of pun known as the equivoque involves a single phrase or word with differing meanings. For instance, one epitaph for a bank teller reads "He checked his cash, cashed in his checks, / And left his window. / Who's next?" The nineteenth-century poet, Anita Owen, uses a pun to side-splitting effect in her verse:
O dreamy eyes,
They tell sweet lies of Paradise;
And in those eyes the lovelight lies
And lies--and lies--and lies!
Another type of pun is the asteismus, in which one speaker uses a word one way, but a second speaker responds using the word in a different sense. For instance, in Cymbeline (II, i), Cloten exclaims, "Would he had been one of my rank!" A lord retorts, "To have smell'd like a fool," twisting the meaning of rank from a noun referring to "noble status" to an adjective connoting "a foul smell." Yet another form of pun is the paragram, in which the wordplay involves altering one or more letters in a word. It is often considered a low form of humor, as in various knock-knock jokes or puns such as, "What's homicidal and lives in the sea? Answer: Jack the Kipper." In spite of the pun's current low reputation, some of the best writers in English have been notoriously addicted to puns: noticeably Shakespeare, Chaucer, and James Joyce.
O dreamy eyes,
They tell sweet lies of Paradise;
And in those eyes the lovelight lies
And lies--and lies--and lies!
Another type of pun is the asteismus, in which one speaker uses a word one way, but a second speaker responds using the word in a different sense. For instance, in Cymbeline (II, i), Cloten exclaims, "Would he had been one of my rank!" A lord retorts, "To have smell'd like a fool," twisting the meaning of rank from a noun referring to "noble status" to an adjective connoting "a foul smell." Yet another form of pun is the paragram, in which the wordplay involves altering one or more letters in a word. It is often considered a low form of humor, as in various knock-knock jokes or puns such as, "What's homicidal and lives in the sea? Answer: Jack the Kipper." In spite of the pun's current low reputation, some of the best writers in English have been notoriously addicted to puns: noticeably Shakespeare, Chaucer, and James Joyce.
نظر