Beatrice Santorini, Linguistic humor

(Relatively) new items

  • Linguistic humor in India (May 08)
  • Maybe, he'd have gotten a Ph.D. in linguistics. Linguistics! Our president! (Aug 07)
  • Washington Post alternative definitions contest, 2007 (Jul 07)
  • General Failure (Aug 06)
  • Mayday, mayday, ... (Aug 06)
  • If you're not part of the solution, ... (Jul 06)
  • The purity of the English language (Oct 05)
  • Roe v. Wade (Sep 05)
  • Who's on first, updated for the 21st century (Jan 04)

  • Sounds, accents, and dialects

  • Chest timers
  • Clinton deploys vowels to Bosnia
  • Hickphonics/English dictionary
  • An Italian conversation
  • Lowering crime rates through linguistic misunderstanding
  • Phillyspeak
  • Dictionaries

  • Apoptosis
  • Daffynitions
  • From The Devil's dictionary
  • Glibquips: Funny words by funny women
  • The meaning of is
  • Science
  • Scientific jargon
  • Sniglets
  • Lexicon (including idioms)

  • Ambiguous recommendations
  • Barbie's sex life
  • Change
  • Classified advertisements
  • Deep thoughts from a chemistry student
  • A drag
  • Eskimo words for snow (not really humor, but pokes holes in urban legend)
  • From elephant to condom
  • Funny signs
  • Funny signs in Great Britain
  • Glibquips: Funny words by funny women
  • Good friends
  • Groucho Mark
  • Headlines
  • Husbands
  • Job evaluations
  • Kids' jokes
  • Lexical ambiguity meets Beethoven's Ninth
  • Mondegreens
  • Newspaper screwups
  • No (in two parts)
  • Order in the court
  • The right track
  • School days
  • Sixteen languages
  • Speeding car
  • Taxi
  • Top ten things that sound dirty about the election but aren't
  • Wives
  • Morphology

  • Biscotti
  • Bush decries hand recount (structural ambiguity)
  • Bush starts cabinet selection
  • Calvin and Hobbes
  • Funny signs
  • German lesson #7
  • Glibquips: Funny words by funny women
  • How I met my wife
  • Keep English verbs strong
  • Mankind
  • Merger mania
  • New dog cross breeds
  • A puzzled chicken
  • From The search for intelligent life in the universe
  • School days
  • Scrod
  • Sopa de cojones de matzo
  • Multilingualism

  • The awful German language
  • Foreign hotel signs
  • Multilingualism, pro and con
  • Name change in Alsace
  • Royte pomerantsen, or How to laugh in Yiddish
  • Sharing
  • Shoecabbages
  • Sixteen languages
  • So-called borrowing
  • Pragmatics

  • Anybody for president
  • Double positive
  • The flip side of the sign
  • Funny signs in Great Britain
  • Gandhi cancels a presupposition
  • Glibquips: Funny words by funny women
  • Hu's on first (a takeoff on Who's on first)
  • Husbands
  • If you promise someone something, keep it (from a fortune cookie)
  • Instructions (with comments)
  • The name of this place
  • Newspaper screwups
  • Royte pomerantsen, or How to laugh in Yiddish
  • The Simpsons
  • Where is God?
  • Who's on first
  • Wodehouse
  • Puns

  • AlGoreithm
  • George W. Bush's Inaugural Address: The First Draft (word play)
  • Car talk credits
  • Glibquips: Funny words by funny women
  • A glossary of medical terms
  • How not to order quiche
  • Kids' jokes
  • Newspaper screwups
  • Timbuktu
  • Tom Swifties
  • The war on Iraq explainified
  • Semantics

  • No (in two parts)
  • Premarital sex
  • From The search for intelligent life in the universe
  • Syntax (includes structural and scope ambiguity)

  • Accounting
  • Ambiguous recommendations (structural ambiguity)
  • The awful German language
  • Cary Grant's repartee (structural ambiguity)
  • Classified advertisements (structural ambiguity)
  • Diagramming sentences
  • Eating out, living over, and so on
  • Funny signs
  • Glibquips: Funny words by funny women
  • Groucho Mark (structural ambiguity)
  • Headlines (structural ambiguity)
  • Mind reading (structural ambiguity)
  • Newspaper screwups (structural ambiguity)
  • Purple people eaters (structural ambiguity)
  • School days (structural ambiguity)
  • The Simpsons
  • Sitting shiva for Running Water
  • Steam locomotives (structural ambiguity)
  • Stranded prepositions
  • The Zen master at the hot dog stand (structural ambiguity)
  • Usage and composition

  • Gesellschaft zur Stärkung der Verben
  • Glibquips: Funny words by funny women
  • He, or she, or they, or who?
  • Household principles for children
  • The importance of grammar
  • Jane Austen and other famous authors violate what everyone learned in their English class
  • Mixed metaphors
  • Newspaper screwups
  • Rules for writing good
  • School days
  • Split infinitives
    Thurber
  • Strengthening German verbs
  • Whom
    Thurber
    Trillin
    Wodehouse
  • Worst analogies
  • Word play

  • Anagrams
  • Homographs
  • Janet Muggeridge's word play site
  • Sarchasm and related terms
  • Other

  • "America reads" receives E for effort
  • Beware of heard
  • Blinkenlights
  • Bon appetit
  • Classified advertisements
  • The English lesson
  • English spelling reform
  • Funny signs in Great Britain
  • German humor
  • Give me a word
  • Glibquips: Funny words by funny women
  • Headlines
  • Helpful phrases for work
  • How to cook a turkey
  • How to tell a language from a dialect
  • Low German
  • Newspaper screwups
  • Obscene gerund?
  • Out of sight, out of mind
  • Quayle-speak
  • "Satisfaction guaranteed" (announcement on an Amtrak train that was running half an hour late; "guaranteed" was left undefined)
  • Excerpts from The search for intelligent life in the universe
  • The sincerest form of flattery
  • Three words in -gry
  • Whining
  • The writing on the wall
  • Yogi Berra: Sayings and ripostes
  • Last modified: 8 Jul 01