Wordstalks 4: 'Punny Things Are Everywhere'

I mentioned in an earlier post my unfortunate habit of failing to take in the full nuance of what someone says because I get distracted by some quirky rhyme or pun or unintentional image that is purely a function of the sounds of the words and totally tangential to what is being said. Today I'd like to share a few fun ones.

I've been this way for my whole life! When I was 13, we studied Chaucer's 'Nun's Priest's Tale.' I knew enough French and Latin at that point and had the kind of brain that worked in the right sort of way that the Middle English was a delightful gift-wrap rather than an infuriating knot. But one of the things that I especially remember relishing was the description of the poor widow who owned the chickens at the center of the story. We are told that she was frugal, lived according to her means, and ate plain, simple food: 

'Milke and broune brede, in which she founde no lacke.'

I _adored_ the cross-linguistic oxymoronic pun here: 'lac' is 'milk' in Latin!

When I was a little older, we had been studying Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing.' Every time I walked into the changing rooms, something would trigger a voice in my head to exclaim 'Ye light of love with your heels!' - a rather inscrutable expression from the play that I didn't really understand. It took me days, if not weeks, to realize that the thing that was triggering this was a plastic bag hanging from someone's peg, above all the running shoes, with the words 'Armor Lux' printed on it in big letters but with the bag creased so that it looked like 'Amor (love) Lux (light).' Of course, when I realized, I chided myself for bad grammar!

Sometimes, different pronunciations can fox me, and sometimes they're just amusing. Just over a year ago, Mt Redoubt, one of several volcanos up here in Alaska, blew its top. Phil and I were still in Hawaii at the time, and we were in an internet cafe. Phil had been having trouble with the computer he was using, something for which his patience is very limited (understandably), and had been irritated. Then, he reached over and muttered to me something like 'Old Redoubt's blown its top.' But I have always known 'Redoubt' as an iambic word and he pronounced it as a trochee, so I heard 'readout' and thought he was saying that the readout on his monitor had finally fried and he was ready to blow his top!

At my writing group recently, a gentleman was reading a story narrated by a pilot who was ferrying a pair of very irritating passengers up to Alaska in difficult conditions. One of the pieces that heightened the narrator's annoyance was the heavy, snorting breathing of one of the guys, that set off the intercom on every breath. This gentleman's pronunciation of 'intercom' made it sound just like 'inner calm' - another delicious oxymoron.

What are your favorite punny stories?