How Common Are Unintended Puns?

Here are three puns from today, and one I read the other day. The first is from a work colleague who said it with absolutely no look that he meant to be funny. The second is from a quote in a news story, again I think said with no intention to make a pun. The third is a pun from a Yahoo! article which might be intentional. You'll have to decide. The last can't be intentional, because it is too morbid and sad for somebody to try to make a pun about such a thing.

I include these very recent ones to help us see how common these Unintended Puns must be. I'm one person, reading a few web pages a day, talking to a few people a day. And yet I've collected about five this week. I'm pretty sure our brains are up to something--and the activation web has a lot do with it.

Here are the puns:

February 25, 2011
While describing his excitement about finding a new gym, a work colleague said: “Have I told you about my new gym? It's worked out great!”

 The next one is subtle--the pun involves a person living in a town called Klinger using the word "cling" to describe people's reaction to a great young basketball player. Click here for the article.

February 25, 2011
Philly teen a legitimate phenom, by Cameron Smith: “...the Klinger (Pa.) Middle School student is focused on being a middle school student...He is a nice kid, and people are going to cling to him.”

 This next one could be on purpose. It's from an article about spouses sharing household chores. Click here for the article.

February 16, 2011
Economics: the key to happy couples' division of labor, by Dory Devlin: “Once you’ve ironed out all disagreements/agreements of splitting chores between the two of you, get ready for some new battles over what chores the kids should do.”

Finally, the morbid, sad one. The headline contains the pun.  Click here for the article.

February 25, 2011
Article by the Associated Press: “Daycare Fire Raises Questions, Sparks Investigation”

So, today's question: How common are Unintended Puns? If I notice them all around me, am I just a crazed victim who can't escape the taunts and abuses of a vast conspiracy? Or does the brain generate these word combinations on a frequent basis? Please help me decide. My sanity may depend on it. Not really--this is a guilt-free blog.

Daily Pun #2

This was sent by a friend of mine--the same friend who told me the "No pun in ten did" joke when we were in Scotland together. He heard it on ESPN the other day.

        "We do not yet know the impact of all of the hard hits in the NFL."

Is this Unintended or not? You decide.

If it is Unintended, here are my assessments for the factors (see January for the blog on my suggested "Pun Factors"):

1. Fitting: It is exactly fitting--hard hits leave impacts on human bodies.
2. Humor: It's pretty funny to me, mostly due to being fitting. I realize it's a little morbid, but it gets extra points for being on national TV.
3. Subtlety: It's not very subtle--I think most people would see it as a pun--but I get puns often before the person says them, due to my warped mind.
4. Context: The sentence stands alone as a pun.
5. Depth: I think it is two deep, because it is absolutely true that we do not know the impact, both metaphorically (as in the full scope of potential rules and equipment changes, how coaches might change how they teach tackling all the way down to the smallest players, etc.) and literally (as in the impact on the players who have been hit--what damage it has done to them).

Verbal and Physical Slips--Unintended Pun Counterparts?

It occurred to me that verbal slips, as discussed in the previous two posts, based on Dr. Motley's research, probably have their equivalent in physical slips, with both probably coming from mental confusion and/or overlap of conflicting intentions. I'm thinking of the tennis player who has positioned herself to hit a lob, and then at the last second changes her mind in favor of a passing shot. The result is that she ends up hitting a perfect setup to the opponent waiting at the net, who then creams the cream puff (unintended pun) for a winner.

Or the baseball outfielder, who upon picking up the line drive base hit, looks up to see the lead runner rounding third. He wants to make a great play at the plate, but then remembers his team is ahead by four runs, so should keep the hitter at first. He attempts to stop his throwing motion, but instead of completely stopping, he only partially stops and lets go of the ball, so the ball ends up rolling toward home plate--and the hitter uses that delay to run to second, and the lead runner scores anyway.

When I mentioned these thoughts to my main sounding board, Claire suggested that this sounded a lot like the comedian Brian Regan, who discusses mixed up common sayings in one of his hilarious bits. See at 1:40 particularly: "Take luck."

Click here for a few good laughs.

Some of the "puns" I have collected are actually kind of like "mixed media"--not just "word play" but more like play between words and other stuff--the word "curry" said in the presence of the smell of the spice curry. The feeling of being tired combined with having trimmed hedges leading to saying "I'm bushed." In other words, so to speak, it seems that the brain doesn't just combine words in its "activation web." (Dr. Motley's term) It seems (to me, anyway), that it combines other things we are sensing or feeling--perhaps much like throwing the ball part way between two places we meant to, or saying parts of two things we meant to say, as in Brian Regan's piece, or smelling and saying "curry." The activation web takes over, and brings these elements together somehow, at a subconcious level.


Today's Unintended Pun, ripped from today's news:

February 19, 2011

Scientist finds Gulf bottom still oily, dead by Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer: “That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.”

The irony is, of course, that "all will be well"--oh, you know what I mean.

Verbal Fluency and the Unintended Pun

After reading Dr. Motley's article, which I discussed last post, I started to wonder if people with high Verbal Fluency would be especially prone to both saying and noticing Untintended Puns. People with high Verbal Fluency basically have lots of connections in their brain to words that are related in different ways--perhaps saying they are good at Word Association, which I will discuss in a future post, would be another way to say it.

I started wondering this because as with much research, the results are aggregated and then reported, disregarding the subjects' native ability. But it seems to me that different people would have different results, based on how their brains are organized. The best that Dr. Motley's research could show, unless the subjects were first tested on Verbal Fluency and other measures, would be the "average" person's response to the stimuli. Someone with low Verbal Fluency would perhaps respond with more mundane word responses; someone with higher Verbal Fluency might range farther through their web of word associations and answer with a more interesting word. See below for an extract from Dr. Motley's article.

Perhaps an experiment could be constructed that would normalize the results, such that the different levels of Verbal Fluency would be taken into account, allowing the basic human tendency of verbal slips and double entendres to be revealed. I guess the experiment might yield very similar results, since the largest part of the bell curve would predominate.


That's where this blog comes in--we need more contributed puns and stories so we can figure out how these things work!

Click here for a Wikipedia article that describes Verbal Fluency.

Here are references to Dr. Motley's two articles:

• 1985 Motley, M.T. Slips of the tongue. Scientific American. 253:116-126.
• 1987 Motley, M.T. What I meant to say. Psychology Today 21(2):24-28.

From the 1987 article:

“a person’s lexicon, or mental dictionary, is organized so that each word in it is interconnected with other words associated by meaning, sound or grammar—somewhat like the interconnection of point in a complex spider web. When we prepare to speak, the relevant parts of the web are activated, causing reverberation within the system. Activation spreads first to the most closely related words, then to words associated with them, and so on. Each word activates an alternate part through the web. The cumulative activation for each word is tallied by checking how often each ‘point’ in the web ‘vibrates,’ and the word with the highest accumulation activation (the most vibration, in our web analogy) is selected. Verbal slips would be explained as the result of competing choices that have equal or nearly equal activation levels.”

Today's Unintended Pun:

August 14, 1992
A roofer and I were discussing the less than first class work that a previous roofer had done, which led to incorrect drainage: “That's water over the dam.”

Actual Science Behind the Unintended Pun

My somewhat scientific bent led me to want to add a somewhat scientific bent to these musings. So I googled “Freudian slip unintended pun,” which led me to an abstract of an article entitled The Production of Verbal Slips and Double Entendres as Clues to the Efficiency of Normal Speech Production, by Dr. Michael Motley of UC Davis. I had added “Freudian slip” to the search, because

1. "Unintended Pun" on its own was returning mostly people reporting their own puns (which of course helps prove the subtitle of this blog), but didn’t get me any scientific information.
2. My daughter Claire, a regular contributor to these pages, had noted that in one of her college classes, she was studying Freudian slips, or parapraxis, which seemed somewhat like Unintended Puns.
   

I figured adding a more “science-y” term might yield more science-y results. And lo, Dr. Motley's article was the primary result.

Click here for the abstract of Dr. Motley's article.

It’s probably a good thing that I only found the abstract, since the full article would most likely be well beyond my understanding. But it did lead me to Dr. Motley. I e-mailed him, who kindly replied, pointing me to two articles he wrote for popular consumption. I could not find links to these articles, but they would be available at most large public libraries, and would make great reading for those of us interested in how “slips” and Unintended Puns lurk just behind so much of what we say.

Here are references to the two articles:

• 1985 Motley, M.T. Slips of the tongue. Scientific American. 253:116-126.
• 1987 Motley, M.T. What I meant to say. Psychology Today 21(2):24-28.
  

Claire found the 1987 article and sent me a copy. Dr. Motley describes a theory known as “spreading activation,” in which

“a person’s lexicon, or mental dictionary, is organized so that each word in it is interconnected with other words associated by meaning, sound or grammar—somewhat like the interconnection of point in a complex spider web. When we prepare to speak, the relevant parts of the web are activated, causing reverberation within the system. Activation spreads first to the most closely related words, then to words associated with them, and so on. Each word activates an alternate part through the web. The cumulative activation for each word is tallied by checking how often each ‘point’ in the web ‘vibrates,’ and the word with the highest accumulation activation (the most vibration, in our web analogy) is selected. Verbal slips would be explained as the result of competing choices that have equal or nearly equal activation levels.”

This sounds so much like how I’ve attempted to explain what I’ve called my Unintended Pun theory—the brain being organized in such a way that words, metaphors, word pictures, and similar-sounding words come tumbling out when we least expect them, creating a combination of words that we don’t mean to come out, but that nonetheless do come out. Thank you, Dr. Motley, for doing this research.

Pun for the road: This one's a little subtle, but you movie buffs will get it.

August 19, 1991
After learning that George Lucas had just contracted to do three more Star Wars movies, a friend said: “He's the driving force behind those movies.”