For those who know me, and some who wish they didn’t, they know I am a proponet of punnery, the use of words in a playful manner.
Not everyone is appreciative of my efforts to have fun with verbiage — my colleague, April, is one of those, and my middle daughter, Deborah, is another — but I press on nonetheless in an effort to make light of Anglicized vocabulary.
There was one recent example I can cite, where one of the young ladies in the office was talking about the theft of an anchor out at Nickle Lake, asking why on earth anyone would do such a thing.
I shrugged and replied, “Maybe they had weighty matters to deal with …”
The reaction was almost instantaneous. The young lady in question said I was terrible, my colleague said she hated me (you know, in a “light” sort of way), and others were booing. Suffice it to say, the only reaction I could have in return was to say, “Thank you, appreciate all the love …”
A few days before that, I was able to celebrate my birthday with three of our four kids at a restaurant in Regina, and I made a pun (and I can’t quite recall what it was), but the reaction was mixed. Deborah shook her head at me in a disapproving way, while my youngest, Johanna, snickered and thought it was good.
Well, who was right? (Jo, clearly …)
The interesting thing is, with Deborah as a writer as well as an artist, one would think she would have an appreciation of the attempted funny use of the English language.
I remember when she was in high school, she admitted one day to being a natural punster. She was listening to a conversation with her siblings, and the puns just came naturally to her mind — but she intentionally pushed the puns out of her mind, stubbornly deciding that this was not a path she wanted to be going down.
I took heart from this, of course, because a fellow writer who is my daughter admitted that it just came naturally to her (and of course I had to point this out to her in support of my punnery). She of course is disdainful of my puns, although she won’t go as far as my colleague to express her dislike of puns.
I am compelled to have fun with words, and as a member of the media, I will “press” on nonetheless.
