Word: punning
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...political figures or popular songs, Flanders and Swann are gaily whimsical the next about animals (their specialty) or plants in love. Their tone is sophisticated; they never spell words out, and use many that are foreign. Their joking is educated, with here a lurking bit of Wordsworth, there a pun on Kyd. They can be most lively when most deadpan, and most deadly when most daft. But their triumph rests on their total effect. Delightful as their songs can be (one is about an Oxford-bred cannibal who no longer likes eating people), the evening would grow a bit becalmed...
...happened, the lunch never came off. and De Vries, like a character in one of his novels (Comfort Me with Apples, The Mackerel Plaza. The Tunnel of Love), was left wistfully savoring the sour cream of the jest. This touch of rueful, pun-prone phantasmagoria has made 49-year-old Peter De Vries the leading comic geographer of commuterland. Humorist De Vries surveys his world with the wacky vision of a man who has inadvertently put on the wrong pair of glasses...
...Words are not understood, or have different meanings to different people. The tragedy of Ionesco's world is that people think words have meaning, try to use them to communicate and, hence, fail completely to know anything or anyone. The language of this world is the cliche and the pun. The normal reply is a non sequitur. As might be imagined, Ionesco is not an easy playwright to stage. Tufts handled him with courage and imagination, doing a fine job with Jack, and a perfectly adequate lesson...
...boggle is, among other things, the gurgle made by quicksand as it closes over its victim. Such febrile considerations flash through the boggled minds of readers as they sink out of sight in Author Wallach's pun-swampy prose. The man is popping with word-foolery. He interrupts his narrative-and a more interruptible narrative would be hard to find-to inform the reader that a tirade is "a sneak attack on a haberdashery," and a syndrome is "a large amphitheater where the ancient Romans used to sin." He dreams moodily of going to Canada and establishing a police...
...about education for women, and it shows Gilbert at close to his worst. Behind the gruff whiskers, fat belly, and sharp tongue there lurked a small, narrow, smug, Philistine, and thoroughly reactionary mind, and a nagging weakness for the most squalidly dull-thud variety of pun. Both these latter qualities are prominently on display in Princess Ida. Moreover, some mad infatuation (something, perhaps, to do with the Tennyson poem of which Ida is a parody) led him to cast the thing in blank verse, of the sort Shaw must have had in mind when he said that blank verse...