In defense of puns.
Without the use of puns…okay, maybe one pun…okay, maybe two…or three…
Some guy once besmirched the play on words by calling it the lowest form of wit.
Which speaks to a time-honored tradition in the literary community of running smear campaigns against things that whoever runs the campaign can’t do very well.
Take, for example, prepositions at the ends of sentences. There’s a commonly repeated apocryphal story about Winston Churchill lambasting the whole culture of complaining about the ultimate preposition with the potentially Churchillian proclamation, “This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
Which is an excellent example of how hard it can be to separate the legend from the man, as the old saying will go in a few hundred years when the saying “separate the legend from the man” becomes an old saying.
It’s also a good example of how we sometimes bring legitimacy to our object lessons by bringing celebrity names into it. It sounds like a much more impressive exclamation if it came from Churchill, right? A man famous for being British and for having some kind of significant effect on history, or something. He couldn’t get where he got without a firm grasp of how to accurately say what he wanted, right?
