Beatrice Santorini, Linguistic humor

• Captain Hook's hand (6 Sep 2019)
• Blowing things up (10 Apr 2018)

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

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

• Ambiguous recommendations
• Bad exam
• 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
• General Failure
• Glibquips: Funny words by funny women
• Good friends
• Groucho Mark
• Headlines
• Husbands
• Job evaluations
• Kids' jokes
• Lexical ambiguity meets Beethoven's Ninth
• Mondegreens (examples from my experience)
• 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
• Washington Post alternative definitions contest, 2007
• Wives

• 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

• The awful German language
• Foreign hotel signs
• Mayday, mayday, ...
• Multilingualism, pro and con
• Name change in Alsace
• N'heures, souris, rames (parsed!) (May 10)
  • Beau-bis Chauffe-tôt
  • Pise, pas riche, hâte
• The purity of the English language
• Royte pomerantsen, or How to laugh in Yiddish
• Sharing
• Shoecabbages
• Sixteen languages
• So-called borrowing
• Waterloo

• Anybody for president
• Bad exam (referential ambiguity)
• Bad exam (violations of Cooperative Principle)
• 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
• Who's on first, updated for the 21st century
• Wodehouse
• Woman gets 20 boyfriends...

• 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
• Roe v. Wade
• Timbuktu
• Tom Swifties
• The war on Iraq explainified
• What do you do with a sick chemist?

• Blowing things up
• No (in two parts)
• Premarital sex
• From The search for intelligent life in the universe

• Accounting
• Ambiguous recommendations (structural ambiguity)
• The awful German language
• Bad exam
• 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)

• 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
• Linguistic humor in India
• Mixed metaphors
• Newspaper screwups
• Rules for writing good
• School days
• Split infinitives
  Thurber
• Strengthening German verbs
• Whom
  Thurber
  Trillin
  Wodehouse
• Worst analogies

• Anagrams
• Homographs
• If you're not part of the solution, ...
• Janet Muggeridge's word play site
• Sarchasm and related terms

• "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
• Maybe, he'd have gotten a Ph.D. in linguistics. Linguistics! Our president!
• 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)
• 8 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: 18 Sep 11