Pun
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Les dents, la bouche. --"Les dents, la bouche" (1900) by Jean-Pierre Brisset |
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A pun (or paronomasia) is a phrase that deliberately exploits confusion between similar-sounding words for humorous or rhetorical effect.
A pun may also exploit confusion between two senses of the same written or spoken word, due to homophony, homography, homonymy, polysemy, or metaphorical usage. Walter Redfern has said: "To pun is to treat homonyms as synonyms". For example, in the phrase, "There is nothing punny about bad puns", the pun takes place in the deliberate confusion of the implied word "funny" by the substitution of the word "punny", a heterophone of "funny". By definition, puns must be deliberate; an involuntary substitution of similar words is called a malapropism.
Puns are a form of word play, and seem to occur in all languages (although some people claim that that they are easier to construct in some languages than others).
See also
- Albur
- Alliteration
- Antanaclasis
- Auto-antonym
- Dajare
- Double entendre
- Eggcorn
- Feghoot
- Malapropism
- Mondegreen
- Paraprosdokian
- Polyptoton
- Satiric misspelling
- Syllepsis
Further reading
