A term you'll meet in wordplay.
A pun is a form of wordplay that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or the similarity in sound between words with different meanings. Puns are sometimes treated as the lowest form of wit (Samuel Johnson called them a "fatal Cleopatra" that Shakespeare could not resist). They are also one of literature's oldest and most universal devices, present in every language and every literary period. Reading them well requires holding both meanings simultaneously.
Several kinds of pun are usually distinguished:
Shakespeare is the most prolific punster in English literature. The plays contain over 3,000 puns. Some are ornamental; some are doing serious work. Mercutio's "grave man" pun is the famous serious example — wordplay at the moment of death, making the joke and the tragedy land together. The pun is the play's argument that wit doesn't suspend mortality; it accompanies it.
Hamlet's punning to Polonius ("These tedious old fools!") and to Claudius ("A little more than kin, and less than kind") is character-establishing. The witty prince uses puns as both display and weapon. Several of Shakespeare's deepest puns are paradoxes compressed into single words — Hamlet's "kin/kind" carries the entire play's argument about the gap between family and feeling.
Several reasons:
Puns have had a bad critical reputation since at least the eighteenth century. Joseph Addison: "The seeds of punning are in the minds of all men." Charles Lamb defended puns against this attitude in his essay "Popular Fallacies": "the worst it can be charged with is, that it puts our brains to a momentary stretch." The bad reputation has more to do with the easy availability of mediocre puns than with the form itself; brilliant puns are still admired even by critics who profess to despise the device.
The contemporary cultural site where puns have settled is the newspaper headline. British tabloid headlines have elevated the punning headline into a genre of its own. "Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious" (Inverness Caledonian Thistle defeating Celtic, 2000) is the near-mythical example. The headline pun is doing the same work the literary pun has always done, in a context that permits no other ornament.
Some puns work only across languages. Joyce's Finnegans Wake is mostly made of multilingual puns; the book's title itself is a pun on "Finn again" awakening. Multilingual puns are allusive in a particular way — they reward the bilingual reader and exclude the monolingual one. The form has gotten more available with globalisation; contemporary fiction increasingly uses puns that move between languages.
Several poets are pun-dense: John Donne in his metaphysical mode, George Herbert, Hopkins (every word in "The Windhover" seems to mean two things), James Merrill (whose late work is built on serious puns). The pun in serious poetry is usually doing semantic compression — making the line carry more than one argument at the same moment.
When a sentence's ordinary meaning seems unusually charged — when a word seems to be doing extra work — check for the pun. Many of literature's deepest puns are not flagged with explicit wordplay markers; the reader has to catch the double meaning by attention. A pun spotted is half-the-pleasure; a pun missed is the writer waiting patiently for the reader who will find it.
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