Thought for Monday, Apr 13, 2009

Why do puns offend? Charles Lamb, a notorious punster,
explained that the pun is 'a pistol let off at the ear;
not a feather to tickle the intellect.' Surely puns
silence conversation before they animate it. Some
stricken with pun-lust sink so far into their infirmity
that their minds become trained to lie in wait for words
on which to work their wickedness. They are the scourge
of dinner tables and the despised prolongers of office
meetings, some letting fly as instinctively as dogs bark
and frogs croak, no longer concerned even with drawing
applause; they simply can't help themselves.

-From an Opinion Piece by
Joseph Tartakovsky, a
student at Fordham Law School
in the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/opinion/28Tartakovsky.html?_r=2

*****

tftd resembles that remrk.