elisem

Here's my idea of another way to support same-sex marriage. Call it "Votes for Dennis."

And we here have this caucus coming up, too. Hmmm....

I hope you didn't mind the link; I know how apolitical you are. ;-)

I would suggest calling it "Votes for Dennis & Paul" but I confess I don't know what the late Sen. Wellstone's position of such things was.

> Flowers for Al and Don

The topic of gay marriage in San Francisco continues to be incredibly moving. But I am distracted by this title-- is it really a pun on "Flowers for Algernon"?

Probably. I generally loathe puns of that sort (and am still figuring out ways to make amends for having perpetrated them, back when I was titling articles), so I was pretty much ignoring the possibility.

(Short form explanation rantlet: I dislike puns that have the wrong connotations, and likening two men getting married to a story with the emotional content and storyline of "Flowers for Algernon" suggests that the punster has not thought this one through. I might be wrong, though. If the punster had indeed thought it through, then I apologize to them for assuming they were unthinking; I'll revise my opinion to something less flattering. [OK, that wasn't a rantlet. Maybe it was a cattycommentlet.])

> and likening two men getting married to a story with the emotional content and storyline of "Flowers for Algernon" suggests that the punster has not thought this one through.

That was exactly my thought; I'm unhappily familiar with the trick as the local newspapers are obsessive about pursuing puns of any stripe (whether they make any sense at all or not) for headlines and picture captions. I don't know, it might not be a pun at all, though. (If I get idly interested enough I'll email the guy and ask, I guess.)

I am all agreement. In fact, I think I'll hop up on this handy soapbox for a moment and agree loudly for a while.

The art of the pun -- and there is an art to it, when it's done well -- has fallen into a sorry state. Some people, perhaps even most people, think that it's enough to simply substitute one word for something similar in some catch-phrase. That's not what punning is. At most, that is identifying word similarities. And it's not art -- or if it is, it's lousy art, non-working art, something that has tried to be art and failed.

Headlines are the worst. If the catch-phrase being punned upon does not bring additional meaning to what's being said, then it should be edited out. Is the title-writer trying to display a knowledge of catch-phrases? Sorry, but it's not how many catch-phrases you have; it's what you do with them. And the average fourth-grader is better at substitute-a-similar-word games than many of the headline-writers whose work I see.

I'm going to take a good example, instead of a bad one. Mr. Ford said recently that people who were bummed out by the news of the television series Angel being discontinued were suffering from anwhedonia. This is funny. Anhedonia is a condition that bears a marked similarity to the malaise that descended on a bunch of us when we heard the news. Angel is a series developed by Joss Whedon. The combination reinforces each other, adds strength to the description of the feeling. (Then again, what else would one expect from a man who once said, after he had been interrupted when reeling off a yard-long quotation and then asked to resume as soon as the interruption had ceased, that this was not necessarily easy when one was in a state of quotus interruptus?)

A pun is like any other piece of writing. If it adds to the story (or the article or the song or the piece or the whatever), if it's doing more than one thing, then it stays; if it's not pulling its weight, but instead would like to do a tapdance routine to try to prove how clever its creator was, then it ought to get the hook, and pretty darn quick. (Yeah, I know, those metaphors were mixed with a Mixmaster. But you get the drift, yah?)