Word: puns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Everyone had been so impressed with the fact that I was going to interview someone at the Ritz-Carlton, and had inspired me with such an otherwise non-existent curiosity about the mystique of those hallowed halls. As I walked through the doors, I indulged myself in the bad pun that they were hollow, not hallowed. The "someone" I was going to interview had gradually taken on a secondary importance, even in my mind. Only slowly, ever so slowly, had it begun to dawn on me that the Ritz-Carlton, spectacular as it might be, had taken on such alluring...
...case at issue derives from the bombing of a CIA office in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1968. The Government charged three members of a left-wing group called the White Panthers, but the principal suspect, Lawrence ("Pun") Plamondon, learned that federal agents had overheard some of his telephone conversations. Plamondon, a onetime sandalmaker and co-founder of the Panthers, demanded to know what evidence the Government had acquired from the tap. Government lawyers refused to tell...
Language, like the world it represents, can never be static. Even today the pun survives fitfully in tabloid headlines: JUDGES WEIGH FAN DANCER'S ACT, FIND IT WANTON. It survives in the humor of S.J. Perelman, the only post-Joycean writer capable of fluent bilingual flippancy: "lox vobiscum," "the Saucier's Apprentice," and the neo-Joycean "Anna Trivia Pluralized." The pun makes its happiest regular appearance in the work of Novelist Peter De Vries, who writes stories about compulsive punners. "I can't stop," he claims. "I even dream verbal puns. Like the one in which...
Like the limerick, the pun may well be a folk-art form that defies condescension, scorn and contempt, and possess es the lust for survival of an amoeba. There will always be some, like that formidable adamant, Vladimir Nabokov, who believe that the pun is mightier than the word, that people who cannot play with words cannot properly work with them. "A man who could call a spade a spade," Oscar Wilde remarked, "should be compelled...
...little encouragement a man can bounce and juggle phrases all his life. That few do - and fewer still do well - may be the fault of formal education, which overstresses the discipline of sequential facts. Tired of such lock steps, the mind takes leaps - sometimes to fresh revelation. The pun is such a jump, but politicians, above all, should look be fore they leap. If puns are to be part of this year's political campaigns, it is to be hoped that the efforts will improve. Already Muskie's punning has begun to work up a backlash...