Puns for the New Year

Happy New Year, everyone! I've got a couple of recent Unintended Puns to share with you, both said by me. I guess one of them isn't so much a pun, but it's kind of a pun (perhaps you can give me your opinion of its pun-ness). In saying it, I realized another way that one can tell that one is saying, if not an Unintended Pun, at least a word play.

On to the puns, to start the New Year on the right foot.

November 19, 2012 To be honest, I can't remember the full context, but while discussing the nature of desert plants and their defense mechanisms with a work colleague, I said: "I wouldn't want to get on the bad side of a cactus, and I do mean the bad side."

This made me think that a way to tell that you've just said a pun is that you repeat yourself: "and I do mean the bad side." I could have said the much more mundane, "I wouldn't want to get stuck by a cactus." But as I realized that the "bad side" of course had a double meaning--the outside, as well as the mean side, I repeated myself to accentuate the humor.

The second one comes from me just talking to myself. (Yes, I do that, and have most of my life. What can I say? I'm doing it right now.) I had been trying to decide whether or not to buy an extra long twin-sized bed for my son, the advantage of which would be allowing him to sleep better than on a regular length twin-sized bed, but of course take less room than a queen-sized bed. But as a I contemplated the extra cost of less common-sized sheets, I decided against the purchase.

November 21, 2012 I said to myself: "When you throw the (extra cost of) sheets on top of it, we should just buy another queen."

I actually laughed out loud at that one.

If you catch yourself repeating something, or discover some other method of noticing word play or better yet, Unintended Puns, drop us a line.