Anyway, today in class during the break right before our test we were talking about this bar Pop-In which is near Popincourt. Pun, okay, fine. After talking about this particular pun in more detail, someone posed this question: Do puns exist in nature, even when not recognized?That is just the kind of question I love to ponder and discuss, so I tried to keep the conversation going.
Most agreed that puns exist in nature, I was the only one who eventually disagreed, and so I eventually gave up because I couldn't deal with what was growing to be not discussion, but argument. In thinking about it more today (and getting a little worked up about it during my test), I am positive I am correct.
Puns do not exist in nature if not recognized by humans.
A pun must have intention. Most of the time puns are supposed to be funny or to make one ponder. A pun is literally a play on words and 'to play' is an action. That means there is inherently intention behind it. A pun is a concept, an idea, something entirely created. The same can be said of written language in general, and without language, alas, no puns.
Someone very aggressively asked me if before humans discovered the liver, if it meant we did not have a liver. This is when I decided to concede, because the argument is entirely different. A liver is physical, a pun is conceptual.
We could get really messy and start to talk about metaphysics, but do we really want to in a blog post? I sure don't.
You make a good argument about puns, and you're right - they are abundant in boat names. I also discuss boat names (among other boating stuff) from @FirstBoat on Twitter. I tweet a "boat name of the day", though they are not always punny or funny.
ReplyDeleteI also have a blog entirely devoted to boat names, and I invite you to post boat name suggestions to all the boaters that come to the site looking for help. The blog is BoatNameBlog.com
Thanks!