"Pun" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indictment—"Goard A'mighty don't know, nor yet anybody else! Why—he don't know, hisself! I says to him, I says, just you clear out them lodgers, I says, and give me the run of the premises, I says, and it shan't cost you a fi'-pun note more in the end, I says. Then if he don't go and tie me down to a price for to make good front wall and all dy-lapidations. And onlest he says wot he means by good, who's to know?... Mortar, John!" John supplied mortar ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... being at a repast with a celebrated Boileau, had undertaken to pun him upon her name:—"What name, told him, carry you thither? Boileau: I would wish better to call me Drink wine." The poet was answered him in the same tune:—"And you, sir, what name have you choice? Janson: I should prefer to ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... This was no comedy to Jane,—her blind Garth at the piano, his dear beautiful head bent over the keys, his fingers feeling for that pathetic little notch, to be made by herself, below middle C. She loathed this individual who could make a pun on the subject of Garth's blindness, and, in the back of her mind, Tommy seemed to join the duchess, flapping up and down on his perch and shrieking: "Kick him out! ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... man who writ this wretched pun," says Mr D., "would have picked your pocket:" which he proceeds to shew not only bad in itself, but doubly so on so solemn an occasion. And yet, in that excellent play of Liberty Asserted, we find something very much resembling a pun in the mouth of a mistress, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... I can trust you, Tom, and my ve'y good friend, youh fatheh, to watch out for Ardea's little fo'tune," was the way he put it. "I haven't so ve'y much longeh to stay in Paradise," he went on, with a silent little chuckle for the grim pun, "and what I've got goes to her, as a matteh of cou'se." Then he added a word that set Tom to thinking hard. "I had planned to give her a little suhprise on her wedding-day: suppose you have the lawyehs make ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... and on reflection I found that I never knew nor heard of one, though I have once or twice heard a woman make a single detached pun, as I have known ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... scratched a section of wire bare. He laughed to himself as he slipped the little microphone out of his left ear. Now he was half deaf as well as half lame—he was literally giving himself to this cause. He would have to remember the pun to tell Alec Diger later, if there was a later. Alec had ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... nose. Johnny was a bully, and he had a bully's reputation to maintain; but he never fought when the odds were against him; and he had a congressman's skill in backing out before the water got too hot. On the whole, he rather enjoyed the pun; and he had the condescension to laugh heartily, though somewhat unnaturally, at ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... It is a very—er—engrossing occupation," returned Hilliard, nobly resisting the inclination to pun; "but I think it could manage without me for a few days longer, and perhaps we could have another ride together. There is a meet somewhere near the day after to- ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... said, 'when I left th' Five Towns fifty-two years sin' to go weaving i' Derbyshire wi' my mother's brother, tay were ten shilling a pun'. Us had it when us were sick—which wasna' often. We worked too hard for be sick. Hafe past five i' th' morning till eight of a night, and then Saturday afternoon walk ten mile to Glossop with a week's work on ye' back, and ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... not, brother Toby, continued my father,—I declare I would not have my head so full of curtins and horn-works.—That I dare say you would not, quoth Dr. Slop, interrupting him, and laughing most immoderately at his pun. ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... rubbered fabric. The ship was fitted with two Wolseley motors of one hundred and eighty horse-power each, and with a whole series of vertical and horizontal rudders. She was popularly called the Mayfly—a name which, both in and out of Parliament, suggested to bright wits an ill-omened pun. ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... wife will reproach you for being sullen and not speaking to her; perhaps she will say that you are ridiculous, when you have just made a pun; but this is one of the slight annoyances incident to our system; and, moreover, what does it matter to you that the education of women in France is the most pleasant of absurdities, and that your marital obscurantism ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... the majority of the names of our hills, and Professor Edward Hitchcock, in commenting on their uncouthness, concluded his disapproval with a pun worth preserving, by saying, "Fortunately there are some summits in the State yet unnamed. It is to be hoped that men of taste will see to it that neither Tom, nor Toby, nor Bears, nor Rattlesnakes, nor Sugar Loaves shall be Saddled upon them." The highest ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... laughing. "That was almost a pun. But I'm afraid I'm a bit selfish in my joy about Acton. Since he's a certainty, I can devote all my mighty mind to rackets. I don't think there is a better pair in the place than Vercoe and ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... it, and said "as 'ow 'e'd 'ave a 'eavy 'eart for hever and hever, hamen," after he was gone. O'Riley remarked, in reference to his departure, that every man in the ship was about to lose a "son!" Yes, indeed he did; he perpetrated that atrocious pun, and wasn't a bit ashamed of it. O'Riley had perpetrated many a worse pun than that before; it's to be hoped that for the credit of his country he has perpetrated ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... answered him in a single word: Mr. Mix started, and gripped the receiver more tightly. "Nothing!... Why, I don't quite get you on that.... It's an open and shut proposition—No, I most certainly am not trying to make a pun; I'm calling you up in my official capacity. That's the most flagrant, barefaced attempt to evade a law—Why, an idiot could see it! It's to drive the crowd into the Orpheum during ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... "Once pun er time there was er bad little girl, an' she wouldn't min' nobody, nor do no way nobody wanted her to; and when her mother went ter give her fyssick, you jes ought ter seen her cuttin' up! she skweeled, an' she holler'd, ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... complicatd pun in this line: made by splitting the word after the fashion of punsters. "Zarbu 'l-Nawakisi" the striking of the gongs, and "Zarbu 'l Nawa, Kisi striking the departure signal: decide thou (fem. addressed to the Nafs, soul or self)" I have ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... would, provided the opportunity remained with him. But it would not, for I would have had judgment enough to take some strychnine first and say my smart thing afterward. The fair record of my life has been tarnished by just one pun. My father overheard that, and he hunted me over four or five townships seeking to take my life. If I had been full-grown, of course he would have been right; but, child as I was, I could not know how wicked ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... Colonel Quarrier. "No pun intended. A good man in a rush at the head of his platoon, but for individual ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... Trust your lives)—Ver. 15. He seems to pun upon the word "capita," as meaning not only "the life," but "the head," in contradistinction to "the feet," mentioned in the next line. As in l. 2 we find that he came to a place where he was not known, we must suppose ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... There was no lightning in his disposition. He was a great laugher, but never at any recent merriment. It took a long while for him to understand a joke. Indeed, if it were subtle or elaborate, he never understood it. But give the doctor, when in good health, a plain pun or repartee, and let him have a day or two to think over it, and he would come in with uproarious merriment that well-nigh would choke him to death, if the paroxysm happened to take him with ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... in one of each. We scarcely know whether it be so or not—we merely relate what we have heard; but we incline to the two Bluchers, because of the eight-and-six. The only additional expense likely to add any emolument to the tanner's interest (we mean no pun) is the immense extent of sixpenny straps generally worn. These are described by a friend of ours as belonging to the great class of coaxers; and their exertions in bringing (as a nautical man would say) the trowsers to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... revolutionary youth. Bonaparte knew very well that the Parisians made pleasantries on his new nobility; but he knew also that their opinions would only be expressed in vulgar jokes, and not in strong actions. The energy of the oppressed went not beyond the equivoque of a pun; and as in the East they have been reduced to the apologue, in France they sunk still lower, namely, to the clashing of syllables. A single instance of a jeu de mots deserves, however, to survive the ephemeral success of such productions; ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... have been timbers in every ship that has floated," returned the vice-admiral, half-unconscious himself, of the pun he was making. ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... [FN299] A pun upon "Khaliyah" (bee hive) and "Khaliyah" (empty). Khaliyah is properly a hive of bees with a honey-comb in the hollow of a tree-trunk, opposed to Kawwarah, hive made of clay or earth (Al-Hariri; Ass. of Tiflis). ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... on, "your aunt was quite right in her estimate of your disposition; but, my dear excitable young friend, I must—ah—give you fair warning that if you feel inclined to be rude at any time, you'd better not be rude here, and if you are bold—ah—you'll get bowled out! Ah—that was an unintentional pun, Leigh, but I don't think you'll find me joking when I have to come to the point. Mind, I never flog a boy under any circumstances, but I've got an equally efficacious way of my own for making my pupils obey me, which never fails, and you'll probably ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... cursores I see the raw material of many sad jokes—whereunto I pray I may never be tempted, but may leave them for an easy exercise for such as have set out upon the shameless career of the irreclaimable pun-flinger. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... on de pun'kin an' de sno'-flakes in de ar', I den begin rejoicin'—hog-killin' time is near; An' de vizhuns ub de fucher den fill my nightly dreams, Fur de time is fas' a-comin' fur de 'lishus ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... Roman poet, whose full name was Publius Ovidius Naso. (Naso means "nose.") Hence the pun ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... work, which for minuteness and the astonishing number and ingenuity of the devices, perhaps exceeded most of the like nature throughout the realm. Amongst other whimsical fancies was a ton crossed with a bar, having the cyphers A and B above and below, which worthless and absurd pun, a sort of emblematic wit much cultivated by our forefathers, indicated the name of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... see the pun, mademoiselle?" asked Poiret. "This gentleman calls himself a man of mark because he is ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... his "Hear hims!" proud, too, of his vote, And lost virginity of oratory, Proud of his learning (just enough to quote), He revelled in his Ciceronian glory: With memory excellent to get by rote, With wit to hatch a pun or tell a story, Graced with some merit, and with more effrontery,[mq] "His country's pride," he came down to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... obvious cases of the comic seem to consist of little more than a shock of surprise: a pun is a sort of jack-in-the-box, popping from nowhere into our plodding thoughts. The liveliness of the interruption, and its futility, often please; dulce est desipere in loco; and yet those who must endure the society of inveterate jokers know how intolerable this sort ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... they are colourless, and in these days we are deboshed with colour; but then they are so luminously limpid and serene, they are so sprightly and graceful and gay! In the gallantry they affect there is a something at once exquisite and paternal. If they pun, 'tis with an air: even thus might Chesterfield have stooped to folly. And then, how clean the English, how light yet vigorous the touch, the manner how elegant and how staid! There is wit in them, and that so genial and unassuming that as like as not it gets leave to beam on unperceived. ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... resolutely pushed her before me. The husband stood at the head of the stairs and my object was to carry her down to the lower story. The stairs were narrow, and by keeping up a good watch, I contrived to force him to give ground, using his spouse as a sort of battering-RAM—not to perpetrate a pun at the expense of the genders—which, I happened to know, had always been successful in making him give ground on all previous occasions. His habitual deference for the dame, assisted me in my purpose. Step by step, however, he disputed my advance; but I was finally successful; ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... after visiting the church of the 'Madonna del Divino Amore' in the plain were now bound to an evening of merriment at Albano. According to him it was not so much a case of 'divino amore' as of 'amore di vino,' and he was very anxious that the English maid should understand his pun. She laughed—pretended—showed off her few words of Italian. She thought Alfredo a funny, handsome little man, a sort of toy wound up, of which she could not understand the works. But after all he was a man; ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Greek word [Greek: demos] means both "The People" and fat, grease. The pun cannot well be kept ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the Sentinel commands all the map-like detail of Pun-nul Bay, with its labyrinthian creeks among a flat density of mangroves, like lustrous, uncertain byways in a sombre field, erratic of shape, magnificent of proportion. Beyond are many islets—dark blue on a lighter plain. In the distance, on the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... his bust up," laughed Reg, dodging the portmanteau that was flung at him for his atrocious pun. ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... his answer long enough to decide against the aimless pun of asking, "What Bushwick?" ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... ruin of all these puns; the gentlemen will hate me; I must learn to ignore their conundrums until they answer them themselves, and to wait patiently for the pun instead of catching it and laughing before it is half-spoken. Why can't I do as the others do? There was Mr. Van Ingen with his constant stream of them, that I anticipated several times. He said to me, "If I were asked what town in Louisiana I would rather be ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... your ladyship,' says he, 'is mistress of all sorts of spells.' But this was Dr. Swift's pun, and ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... preceded it. He was more of a child than his nieces, Madame Surville tells us: "laughed at puns, envied the lucky being who had the 'gift' of making them, tried to do so himself, and failed, saying regretfully, 'No, that doesn't make a pun.' He used to cite with satisfaction the only two he had ever made, 'and not much of a success either,' he avowed in all humility, 'for I didn't know I was making them,' and we even suspected him of embellishing them ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... ship. Brahe afterwards made a proper submission for the fault he had committed, at his own court. His conduct reminds us of Sir Henry Wotton's definition of an ambassador—that he is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. A pun ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... don't understand what you're talking about!" he says. "But I fancy it's a pun of some sort! Very well, then, what ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... then he used a bit of 'is master's or'nary language, which as ye knows, Passon, is chice—partic'ler chice. 'Evil communications c'rupts good manners' even in a valet wot 'as no more to do than wash an' comb a man like a 'oss, an' pocket fifty pun a year for keepin' of 'is haristocratic master clean. Lor'!—what a ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... to a pun? From bad to worse! I'm enough of a psychologist to feel the evil spreading, and I've the scent of ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... pun on "cant" and "recant" was not original, though Lord John's application of it was. Its inventor seems to have been Lady Townshend, the brilliant mother of Charles Townshend, the elder Pitt's Chancellor of the Exchequer. When she was asked if George Whitefield, the evangelical preacher, ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... feel too nervous," I replied, not laughing at his joke, as I might have done another time, although the pun was a regular old stager, passing the yet unopened letter across the table. "You read it, ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the brook had been, a new line of sewer was laid, and my wife suggested "Sewerside," but after punishing her with a kiss for her bad pun, I suggested "Sunnyside." ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... have occurred in vol. i. 238, where I have noted the punning "Sabr" patience or aloes. I quote Torrens: the Templar, however, utterly abolishes the pun in the last ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... forget to walk like a woman in the State of Louisiana,"—as near as the pun can be translated. The company laughed. Jean Thompson looked at his wife, whose applause he prized, and she answered by an asseverative toss of the head, leaning back and contriving, with some effort, to get her arms folded. ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... for a pun?" Beatrice blinked her big eyes at him. "If you're quite through with the train-robbers, perhaps you will tell ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... Town-Hall[1] repairs: Where, mindful of the nymph whose wanton eye Transfixed his soul and kindled amorous flames, Chloe, or Phillis, he each circling glass Wisheth her health, and joy, and equal love. Meanwhile, he smokes, and laughs at merry tale, Or pun ambiguous, or conundrum quaint. But I, whom griping Penury surrounds, And Hunger, sure attendant upon Want, With scanty offals, and small acid tiff, (Wretched repast!) my meagre corpse sustain: Then solitary ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Steve. Jack's no ordinary rip-roaring, hell-raisin' miner. He knows what's what. That's why we call him Crumbs—because he's fine bred. Pun, see. Fine ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... we have a practical pun now naturalised in our language, in the word "tandem." Are any of your correspondents ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... this story freely among themselves, being, no doubt, amused by the Lamb-like pun, but also enjoying the malicious pleasure of hinting that it might have been as well for their art education if the advice of the gentle humorist had been followed. Anyone who wants to know what kind of an artist ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... young companions, and flew to his solitary task, while the classical boys avenged themselves by a schoolboy's villanous pun: stigmatising the studious application of Bossuet by the bos suetus aratro which frequent flogging had made them classical enough ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... dead roses, a glance at a pun, A toss of old powder, a glint of the sun, They meet in the volume that Dobson ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... paper before me the thoughts and fancies which came into my head. A very odd-looking object was this page of memoranda. Many of the hints were worked up into formal shape, many were rejected. Sometimes I recorded a story, a jest, or a pun for consideration, and made use of it or let it alone as my second thought decided. I remember a curious coincidence, which, if I have ever told in print,—I am not sure whether I have or not,—I will tell over again. I mention it, not for the pun, which I rejected as ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... her head. "I haven't an ocean," Beth proceeded. "You don't see it? Well, I didn't at first. You see an ocean and a notion sound the same if you say them sharp. Now, do you see? They call that a pun." ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Daisy. A dreadful American man once told me that my aunt was a Bluebell and that I was a Harebell—with two l's and an e—because my hair is so thick. I warn you, so that you may avoid making such a bad pun." ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... prominent at that time. "Yes," said Jerrold, drawing his finger round the edge of his wineglass, "that's the range of his intellect,—only it had never any thing half so good in it." I quote this merely as one of the average bons-mots which made the small change of his ordinary conversation. He would pun, too, in talk, which he scarcely ever did in writing. Thus he extemporized as an epitaph for his friend Charles Knight, "GOOD NIGHT!"—When Mrs. Glover complained that her hair was turning gray,—from using essence of lavender (as she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... will have pity on the ignorance of one who is so new to the profession. As I have intimated, I am no more than an unworthy barrister, in the service of his Majesty, expressly sent from home on a particular errand. It it were not a pitiful pun, I might add, I ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... gone one all right," said Sahwah, but Nyoda's mind was too busy with wondering about Gladys to notice the pun. ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... University Church, "a particular part," says the Westminster Review, "is appropriated to the heads of the houses, and is called Golgotha therefrom, a name which the appearance of its occupants renders peculiarly fitting, independent of the pun."—Am. ed., Vol. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... male Forey allied the System and the cake in a miserable pun. Adrian, a hater of puns, looked at him, and held the table silent, as if he were going to speak; but he said nothing, and the young gentleman vanished from the conversation in a blush, extinguished by his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... had made in French, he responded 'that Brummell had been stopped, like Buonaparte in Russia, by the 'Elements'' I have put this pun into 'Beppo', which is 'a fair exchange and no robbery;' for Scrope made his fortune at several dinners (as he owned himself) by repeating occasionally as his own some of the buffooneries with which I had ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... the understanding of Chesterton. With him, profound gravity and exuberant fooling were always intermingled and some of his deepest thoughts are conveyed by a pun. He always claimed to be intensely serious while hating to be solemn and it was a mixture apt to be misunderstood. If gravity and humour are the two lobes of the average man's brain, the average man does not bring them into play simultaneously to anything ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... hundred barks was equipped and manned by the natives of the desert. The Imperial navy of the Romans fled before them from the Pamphylian rocks to the Hellespont; but the spirit of the emperor, a grandson of Heraclius, had been subdued before the combat by a dream and a pun. [93] The Saracens rode masters of the sea; and the islands of Cyprus, Rhodes, and the Cyclades, were successively exposed to their rapacious visits. Three hundred years before the Christian aera, the memorable though fruitless siege ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... indeed, which in the social circle will in spite of all due gravity awaken a harmless smile, and Shenstone solemnly thanked God that his name was not liable to a pun. There are some names which excite horror, such as Mr. Stabback; others contempt, as Mr. Twopenny; and others of vulgar or absurd signification, subject too often to the insolence of domestic witlings, which occasions irritation even in the minds of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... rough-looking features and active limbs, wearing his hat over his ear and displaying a flower in his button-hole. He was the Vicomte's ideal. The young aristocrat was delighted at having him there; and stimulated by his presence, he even attempted a pun; for he said, as ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... the tongue could rest, ere the lips could close The sound of a listener's laughter rose. It was not the scream of a merry boy When harlequin waves his wand of joy; Nor the shout from a serious curate, won By a bending bishop's annual pun; Nor the roar of a Yorkshire clown;—oh, no! It was a gentle laugh, and low; Half uttered, perhaps, perhaps, and stifled half, A good old-gentlemanly laugh; Such as my uncle Peter's are, When he tells you his tales of Dr. Parr. The rider looked to the left and the ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... nice of Norris, your Cambridge grocer, to placard the fruit in his shop window in our honor. "Lindencrone beauties" and "the Danish pair" show a certain amount of humor which ought to be applauded. Such a pun goes to my heart. I hope you encouraged him by buying them all and can tell me what a ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... of ideas in the same sentence is an inexhaustible source of amusing varieties. There are many ways of bringing about this interference, I mean of bracketing in the same expression two independent meanings that apparently tally. The least reputable of these ways is the pun. In the pun, the same sentence appears to offer two independent meanings, but it is only an appearance; in reality there are two different sentences made up of different words, but claiming to be one and the same because both have the same sound. We pass from the pun, by imperceptible ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... time Rastignac had heard this statement he had howled with laughter. Now, however, knowing that she could not see the fallacy, he did not try to argue the point. The Amphibs were, in their way, as hidebound—no pun intended—as ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... school), Said (thinking he might change disgrace For laughter, and thus save his place), "Oh! call me not a stupid cur, 'Twas but a lapsus linguae, sir." "A lapsus linguae?" one guest cries, "A pun!" another straight replies. The joke was caught—the laugh went round; Nor could a serious face be found. The master, when the uproar ceased, Finding his guests were all well pleased, Forgave the servant's slippery feet, And ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... bring them on his own back,' which shaft took immensely, as proved by the loud guffaws and low chuckles that echoed through the beautiful forest whose branches shaded us from the August sun. His reputation as a wit of the first water was firmly established, and every pun and jest thereafter succeeding was crowned by the halo of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... noted. In his recent study of Rhythm (405 a), Dr. Bolton has touched up some aspects of the subject. With children "the habit of rhyming is almost instinctive" and universal. Almost every one can remember some little sing-song or nonsense-verse of his own invention, some rhyming pun, or rhythmic adaptation. The enormous range of variation in the wording of counting-out rhymes, game-songs, and play-verses, is evidence enough of the fertility of invention of child-poets and child-poetesses. Of the familiar ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... that affair," said Quincy, conscious, when too late, that he had wasted a pun on an obtuse individual. ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... Tish seldom makes a pun, which she herself has said is the lowest form of humor. The dig at my figure was unkind, also, and unworthy of her. I turned and ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... There is a pun in the French on the two meanings of the verb hausser,—"to raise" and to "augment" or ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... castles suggested to him his plan of conquest—by taking town after town and fortress after fortress, and gradually plucking away all the supports before he attempted the capital. He expressed his resolution in a memorable pun or play upon the name of Granada, which signifies a pomegranate. "I will pick out the seeds of this pomegranate one by one," said the cool ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... all my London news. You will not hear of my Cottage and Garden; so now I will shut up shop and have done. We have had a dismal wet May; but now June is recompensing us for all, and Dr. Blow may be said to be leading the great Garden Band in full chorus. This is a pun, which, profound in itself, you must not expect to enjoy at first reading. I am not sure that I am myself conscious of the full meaning of it. I know it is very hot weather; the distant woods steaming blue under the noonday sun. I suppose you are living ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... stuck, and couldn't get any farther, and Allison had to be smart and pun on my name. ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... f(1) The pun here cannot be kept. The word (in Greek), Paean, resembles (that for) to strike; hence the word, as recalling the blows and wounds of the war, seems ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... hoped it wuz religion, but felt dubersome, and hurried there fast as I could. I crossed the automobile track where crowded cars wuz runnin' all the while round and round, past the rows of big high headed mettlesome hosses (this is a pun; they ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... a l'amour. Emily flirted with the wing of a chicken saute au supreme, coquetted with perdrix perdu masque a la Montmorenci, and tasted a boudin a la Diebitsch. The wines were excellent—the Geisenheim delicious—the Champagne sparkling like a pun of Jekyll's. But nothing aroused the attention of the Viscount Chambery so much as a liqueur, which Mr. Graeme assured him was new, and had just been sent him by the Conte de Desir. The dessert had ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... that humorist - the first that made a pun at all - Who when a joke occurred to him, however poor and mean, Was absolutely certain that it never had been done at all - How popular at dinners ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... feast of the Circumcision the bursar gives to every member a needle and thread, adding the injunction, "Take this and be thrifty." It is said, I know not with what truth, that it is to commemorate the name of the founder, Robert Egglesfield—by the visible pun, aiguille ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... a little boy at that time, and my grandfather and my great- grandfather were both living then, and both held the first royal rank among the Ottawas. My grandfather was then a sub-chief and my great- grandfather was a war chief, whose name was Pun-go-wish: And several other chiefs of the tribe I could mention who existed at that time, but this is ample evidence that the historian was mistaken in asserting that there was no known Ottawa chief existing at the time ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... local colour in the play, the mixture of pleasantries and familiar speeches with the tragic dialogue, and of heroism and savagery in the character of Hernani, and they made all manner of fun of the species of pun—de ta suite, j'en suis—which terminated the first act. "Certain lines were captured and recaptured, like disputed redoubts, by each army with equal obstinacy. On one day the romantics would carry a passage, which the enemy would retake the next day, and from which it became ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... perambulator to put them in—or a ridiculous little white-washed house made of mud and tin, and calling itself Warwick Castle, Blenheim, Abbotsford! They haven't a very good hold, these Simla residences, and sometimes they slip fifty yards or so down the mountain-side, but the chimneys (bad pun coming) are never any more out of drawing than ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... compelled Mrs. Poppleton to stare at me—oh, her eyes I Thereupon, her husband began his dread performance. The patience, the heroic patience, of that dear, good fellow! I have known him explain, and re-explain, for a quarter of an hour, and invariably without success. It might be a mere pun; Mrs. Poppleton no more understood the nature of a pun than of the binomial theorem. But worse was when the jest involved some allusion. When I heard Poppleton begin to elucidate, to expound, the perspiration already on his ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... of seizing on any bizarre incident reported in the morning papers, enfolding it in "funny language," adding a pun, and thus making it his own. He had a cunning mastery of periphrasis, and a telling ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... S'pose we say a fifty-pun' note," was the facetious reply. "I could do with a fifty-pun' ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... have been well for the writer of the above-mentioned leaderette had he referred to the ninth of ELIA's Popular Fallacies, and been thereby reminded how "a pun is a pistol let off at the ear; and not a feather to tickle the intellect." The Baron is prepared to admit that the lesson to be learned from this delightful Essay of CHARLES LAMB's is, that a pun once let off, has fizzled ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... pasture before the Warren stables, as we shall neither see lights nor hear noises, if it isn't the blowing of our own noses. That's what I say, and I've said it many a time; but there's nobody 'ull ventur a ten-pun' note on their ghos'es as they make so ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... ashore, I drank. I even drank a bit more than I had been accustomed to drink in California prior to the voyage. The people in Hawaii seemed to drink a bit more, on the average, than the people in more temperate latitudes. I do not intend the pun, and can awkwardly revise the statement to "latitudes more remote from the equator;" Yet Hawaii is only sub-tropical. The deeper I got into the tropics, the deeper I found men drank, ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... right hand, and a huge bronze snuff-box, from which he continually helped himself, on his left. Clare having been formally introduced, Charles Lamb took a whole handful of snuff, and falling back in his armchair, stuttered out an atrocious pun concerning rural poets and hackney coaches. Seeing that his guest looked somewhat displeased, he took him under closer treatment at his right hand, and with the help of the big decanter, soon put him into excessive good humour. The conversation ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin |
