First, a little background. I had travelled to Scotland in September of 2008 with a pastor friend of mine. He had been invited there by church leaders to discuss ways the church in the U.S. and the church in Scotland could work together; he had asked me to go along with him, which meant we had a lot of time together on the plane and in the car. Among more sophisticated topics of conversations, we got to talking about puns. He told me a joke, whose punch line is “No pun in ten did.” Very funny. That of course prompted me to explain my now-famous Unintended Pun Theory.
Then in late October of 2008, my pastor friend and I were meeting about our trip. He had been making some home improvements, prompted us to try to remember the word for the thin layer of wood that is used to cover composite material to make it look nicer. We couldn’t think of it, and went on to discuss more important matters. Then, as I drove home from that meeting, a Lynyrd Skynyrd song played on the radio. As I often do when I hear Skynyrd songs, I started trying to think of the lead singer of the band who died in the 1977 plane crash. “Ronnie, Ronnie…what was his name. His brothers are Donnie and Johnny…” both also rock singers. Then I thought of it. And at the exact, I mean the exact instant I thought of the singer’s name, I thought of the word I was trying to think of earlier. The name is “Van Zant”, and the word of course is “veneer”. That’s when I almost drove off the road. Fortunately, I didn’t.
Remember, I am not a cognitive neuroscientist, or research scientist of any sort, but that strikes me as pretty strong anecdotal evidence that something very interesting is going on in the brain, with regard to word/sound/metaphor organization.
Please let me know what you think about this, both metaphorically and literally--what strange things have your brains led you to think or say?
Here's a recent one for the road.
January 24, 2011 During a discussion on the institution of baptism, and whether or not infants should be baptized, someone in the conversation said: “We have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water.”I view this as a "two-deep" pun, since we are talking about babies, and we use water during the baptism. It might even be three-deep, since we throw water on the baby (in a "spinkle" type baptism, or throw the person in the water, in a "dunking" type baptism). Either way, it was very hard for me not to laugh when the person said it, given the solemnity of the conversation.
Hi! I don't know if I should post this because it leads to pretty guilt-filled laughter, but you can decide.
ReplyDeleteI was talking with someone whose friend was committed to giving blood and, when she had a friend with cancer, bone marrow.
I commented, "I don't know if I could just give bone marrow for charity, but if I had a friend who was dying, I'm sure I would suck it up."
That certainly does provoke a smile, followed by a strong desire to repress the smile. And insofar as the "factors"--this one is pretty funny (though you would try to avoid laughing in front of your friend); it seems two-deep, since you would more likely suck blood than bone marrow, but you could do both, and "sucking up" bone marrow would be a way to extract it for donation; it isn't specifically fitting, since "sucking it up" is a common expression; it's fairly subtle, since a lot of people might not get the connection of sucking and blood/bone marrow--since it is a common expression (I guess that's' why it seems subtle to me); and the sentence itself is a pun, without needing to know the full context.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Claire--entertaining, but as you knew--morbid!