Puns use words with multiple meanings, sounds, or spellings to create secondary meanings. Homographic puns use words with multiple meanings, homophonic puns use words that sound alike, and Tom Swifties play on adverbs and verbs. Puns can be humorous or serious, and can be found in literature, comedy, and word games. Shakespeare’s Richard III contains a famous homophonic pun on the word “son.”
A pun is a type of pun that creates secondary meaning to a sentence by using words that sound or look alike or have multiple meanings. There are many different types of puns, including homographic, homophonic, and Tom Swifty. While punning is often done for humor, it can also be used to create more serious puns that trade on double meanings.
The homographic pun plays on words that have more than one meaning, despite being spelled identically. In a pun word that is homographic, for example, the word “littering,” both senses of the word should be applicable to the pun. For example, the sentence “A dog that has puppies on the sidewalk is considered trash,” is a real homographic pun, as the dog “dirties” by giving birth to puppies, and also “dirties” by placing inappropriate objects on the sidewalk. While not all puns incorporate both meanings, the pun is often considered ideal if both versions can be applied.
Homophonic puns can be easier to construct, as they are based on words that simply sound alike, rather than a single word with multiple meanings. Some good examples of homophones might include rain/reign/kingdom, bread/farming and they/there/are. Ideally, homophonic puns are constructed to exploit the meanings of both terms; for example, the phrase “Joey is crying because he was hit by a yell/ball” can either mean that Joey was hit by a ball or that he was overcome with the need to cry. Some homophones may ignore the finer points of word construction to get the point across. In a pun like “Margo complimented the vase because she was told it needed to be rated/praised”, the term “un-praised” is not actually a correct word, but it serves the purpose of the story quite well. punner.
A Tom Swifty is a type of pun that plays on the relationship between adverbs and verbs. To create a Tom Swifty, an adverb is added to the end of a sentence that refers to part of the previous line of dialogue. For example, “I really like beagles,” Tom said stubbornly,” uses the term “stubbornly” as a pun on the word “beagle.” Tom Swifty’s puns are often found in humorous literature and are almost sure to elicit a groan from any astute reader.
Humorous puns are generally constructed to amuse the punner and his audience by playing with vocabulary and context. They are often found in stand-up comedy, comedy films, and comedy stories and books. Fun word games are also a common tool for teachers, who hope to instill an appreciation for reading and vocabulary in young readers by teaching them how to play with words.
While serious literary puns can require a deep understanding of context, hunting them down in great works of literature can be a fascinating task for the busy punner. One of the most famous serious puns is found in the opening verse of William Shakespeare’s play, Richard III. The line, “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,” contains a homophonic pun on the word “son.” In the sentence, the word seems to refer to Edward IV, son of the Duke of York, to whose throne Richard III has just taken. The change to the homophone ‘sun’, however, creates a reference both to the sun badge worn by Edward IV and to the ‘sun’ which transforms the ‘winter of our discontent’ into a ‘glorious summer’.
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