The nuance of puns

Nothing quite satisfies like the moment when you become a pun god. Not a puny god, but a god of puns among mere mortals. Sadly, I don’t always remember those moments. I had a total recall yesterday for one pun, and I can remember thinking, that was my greatest pun, but today I can’t recall the pun nor the situation it so perfectly matched. I’ve burned calories trying to remember.

I do remember one opportunity where the most amazing pun dropped into my lap, but I couldn’t deliver. My supervisors were having an impromptu meeting near my desk, and during their discussion they were trying to remember a name.

A: I think it’s Sharron.
B: No, Sharron is Karen.

I had a slight chuckle. I was waiting for one of the other supervisors to pick up the pun, but they just kept talking as if nothing had happened. If it hadn’t been every single supervisor in the building in that group, I would have probably butted in. But, I just had to keep working and mutter under my breath, “Sharron is Karen. Sharing… is caring…”

There are also great puns that remain loaded in the chamber waiting for its moment to arrive. Someday, I dream of encountering the perfect moment for “disambiguate”. I don’t think that moment will ever arrive, though.

A: Why are you surprised I ate this whole sandwich? Please disambiguate.
B: Disambig…uate the whole thing!

But I do want to record an egghorn I saw in the wild. An egghorn is a word that gets spelled incorrectly because someone misheard it as two or more simpler words. Thus “acorn” might be written “egghorn”. In a comment, now deleted, someone wrote about how a situation had newonce.

I practically dropped to my knees to thank the language gods. It’s rare to see such a perfect egghorn in the wild, especially in an otherwise articulate sentence that had a bit of an elitist edge. I should have screenshotted it, because the setting of an egghorn is at least half of the joy it brings. The other half is the internal logic of the words. The situation has newonce, because a fresh detail applies just this once to this particular situation.

That’s what fullfeels the day of a language nerd.