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Updated: June 12, 2025
It always costs me a purty good chase in the woods." "How the fellow beats about the bush, to find what game we are driving at," observed Middlemore, in an under tone, to his companion. "Let the Yankee alone for that," returned he, whom our readers have doubtless recognized for Henry Grantham; "I will match his cunning against your punning any day."
In Elizabethan England the pun was as great a power in the jocularity of the law-courts as it is at present; the few surviving witticisms that are supposed to exemplify Egerton's lighter mood on the bench, being for the most part feeble attempts at punning.
Take hackneyed jokes from Miller, got by rote, With just enough of learning to misquote; A mind well skill'd to find or forge a fault, A turn for punning call it Attic salt: Fear not to lie, 'twill seem a lucky hit, Shrink not from blasphemy, 'twill pass for wit, Care not for feeling, pass your proper jest, And stand a critic! hated, yet caress'd. The survey was continued.
I must add to these great authorities, which seem to have given a kind of sanction to this piece of false wit, that all the writers of rhetoric have treated of punning with very great respect, and divided the several kinds of it into hard names, that are reckoned among the figures of speech, and recommended as ornaments in discourse.
The earl of Stirling lived in friendship with the most eminent wits of his time, except Ben Johnson, who complained that he was neglected by him; but there are no particulars preserved concerning any quarrel between them. My lord seems to have often a peculiar inclination to punning, but this was the characteristic vice of the times.
There was a young man of whom I made a note; he was such a beautiful specimen of his class. Sometimes he was very facetious, chattering, joking, punning, showing off; then, as the game went on and he lost and had to pay the consommation, he dropped his amiability, slanged his partner, declared he wouldn't play any more, and went away in a fury.
Meanwhile the dog is clear in his own conscience, and draws, with a human nicety, the distinction between formal and essential truth. Of his punning perversions, his legitimate dexterity with symbols, he is even vain; but when he has told and been detected in a lie, there is not a hair upon his body but confesses guilt. To a dog of gentlemanly feeling, theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices.
"'Love, virtue, valour, yea, all human charms, Are shrunk and centred in that heap of bones. Oh! there are wondrous beauties in the grave!" I made some punning rejoinder, and we sallied out to earn an appetite in the Tuilleries for Madame Laurent's dinner. At the hour of half-past five we repaired to our engagement.
He replied: They are like the punning riddles which are asked at feasts or the children's puzzle about the eunuch aiming at the bat, with what he hit him, as they say in the puzzle, and upon what the bat was sitting. The individual objects of which I am speaking are also a riddle, and have a double sense: nor can you fix them in your mind, either as being or not-being, or both, or neither.
You see, of course, if you're not a dunce, How it went to pieces all at once, All at once, and nothing first, Just as bubbles do when they burst. End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay. Logic is logic. That's all I say. I think there is one habit, I said to our company a day or two afterwards, worse than that of punning.
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