"No Pun Intended" Discussion

[deeperwell42]

I. Love. This.

How many is that now in the "My Hobby:" series?

[Lawman]

This joke was also done on Rat Race by Rowan Atkinson's character. It got old for me quickly, although I guess it's still fun. Pun definitely intended.

[Greener]

How else would you spell "dammit"? With an n, like "damnit"? That just looks weird.

Maybe like... "Damn it" ?

[radtea]

Seeing mostly Americans arguing about the "correct spelling of an English word" on an international forum and making claims that "the correct spelling of a word" is a factual matter, where the difference between the "correct spelling" and the "incorrect spelling" is a matter of a single letter, really gives colour to my day.

I think it's going to be one of my favourite things all week.

[philsov]

as bad as most grammar nazis are, I don't think I've ever been corrected on dammit, gonna, y'all'll (you all will, I love that word), etc.

Anyways, great comic. I love the My Hobby set.

[Red Hal]

On a related note:

• Nobody cares if your puns were intended.

Ignore that website. The guy's a dick.
Philsov, I've nver seen y'all'll before. I like it! The Northern Irish equivalent would be Yousens'll.

[GodShapedBullet]

On a related note:

• Nobody cares if your puns were intended.

Ignore that website. The guy's a dick.
Philsov, I've nver seen y'all'll before. I like it! The Northern Irish equivalent would be Yousens'll.

How about this? http://cowbirdsinlove.com/3

[Gero]

Narf. Everything I said was said by someone else before me in the thread. But worse, it was said better.

"...it's a troll that works best on the most literate" ---- how bout that. trolling your own forum intentionally?

[Red Hal]

On a related note:

• Nobody cares if your puns were intended.

Ignore that website. The guy's a dick.
Philsov, I've nver seen y'all'll before. I like it! The Northern Irish equivalent would be Yousens'll.

How about this? http://cowbirdsinlove.com/3

I like it, but the author is actually saying that they care deeply whether the pun was intended or not, which sort of contradicts Soultaker~'s (wow putting an apostrophe after a tilde is weird) assertion that nobody cares.

[Sprocket]

equality in mental traps now!

[mootinator]

Actually if you look carefully there are ten puns in there. I would have thought at least one of them would have jumped out at you, but it appears no pun intended.

Win.

[Brooklynxman]

I also tried this on my friends. And have had it tried on me. People refused to give up.

I was the last one standing, no one made something that I couldn't construe as sexual.

As for dammit, I spell it that way cause otherwise my computer picked it up as a typo, so I just kinda got used to it (too lazy to add it as a word)

[GemT]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=damnit%2C+dammit

Dammit wins, apparently.

I always use an 'n' though, no pun intended.

But if you total up "damn it" with damnit I think it wins hands down
http://www.google.com/trends?q=damnit%2 ... all&sort=0

[NoJoy]

I think the woman at 1:55 in this news story read the comic:
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?secti ... id=6708346

[Invertin]

Presumably someone figured out there was no "n" sound anywhere, so s/he replaced it with an m.

Tsunami should be Sunami then?

[Phasma Felis]

Presumably someone figured out there was no "n" sound anywhere, so s/he replaced it with an m.

Tsunami should be Sunami then?

If you're pronouncing it wrong, sure. The "T" in Tsunami is not silent.

[Baza210]

Presumably someone figured out there was no "n" sound anywhere, so s/he replaced it with an m.

Tsunami should be Sunami then?

Tsu and Su are different syllables in Japanese, the language whence the word comes.

[Phasma Felis]

Seeing mostly Americans arguing about the "correct spelling of an English word" on an international forum and making claims that "the correct spelling of a word" is a factual matter, where the difference between the "correct spelling" and the "incorrect spelling" is a matter of a single letter, really gives colour to my day.

I think it's going to be one of my favourite things all week.

U no, ur rite. Speling is oll rellativ. Its sillie too worie ey lott abowt it.Wee shud oll just lyeten upp!

[Lerkistan]

Re the whole 'dammit' thing....
Wouldn't it have originated from:
damn it - as in "God damn it" - which makes damnit simply lacking a space.... hrm.
Maybe we need an apostrophe added! dam'it!

Maybe. I used that logic for 'til instead of the annoyingly popular 'till, but after a little research, turned out that 'until' was a shortening of 'untill,' so I was and am still wrong, technically. I'm going to spell it 'damnit' 'til I die.

Of course, neither 'til nor 'till are correct, because it's just till. Which, by the way, is NOT in any way a short form of until; the word till was around long before until.

[Baza210]

Re the whole 'dammit' thing....
Wouldn't it have originated from:
damn it - as in "God damn it" - which makes damnit simply lacking a space.... hrm.
Maybe we need an apostrophe added! dam'it!

Maybe. I used that logic for 'til instead of the annoyingly popular 'till, but after a little research, turned out that 'until' was a shortening of 'untill,' so I was and am still wrong, technically. I'm going to spell it 'damnit' 'til I die.

Of course, neither 'til nor 'till are correct, because it's just till. Which, by the way, is NOT in any way a short form of until; the word till was around long before until.

In Swedish, anyway.

[radtea]

Plasma Felis wrote:

U no, ur rite. Speling is oll rellativ. Its sillie too worie ey lott abowt it.Wee shud oll just lyeten upp!

Well, spelling hardly matters if your reading comprehension is so poor that that's what you think I said!

[g026r]

There's a reason why dammit has an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary and damnit doesn't

Don't know where you get your sources, but in my research, the Oxford English Dictionary was the only main dictionary that didn't have an entry for "dammit".

Oxford Dictionary: http://www.askoxford.com/results/?view= ... type=exact
no results

That's because the dictionary online at askoxford.com is the Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English. It's the smallest of all the various versions of the OED (approx. 1400 pages in printed format), and as such is missing many words found in the single-volume Concise Oxford English Dictionary (approx. 1600 pages) and even more words found only in the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (approx. 22000 pages).

(I have no idea how many pages are in the 2-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.)

[reevebot]

I've always gone with inserting an unnecessary "proverbial." More to be irritating than confusing. "No pun intended" might be better.

[arbivark]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect
In English language literature, eye dialect is the literary technique[1] of using non-standard spelling to approximate a pronunciation that is actually no different from the standard pronunciation[2][3] but has the effect of dialectal, foreign, or uneducated speech. Eye dialect differs from other methods of indicating of accent or speech variation via orthography in that a difference in spelling doesn't indicate a difference in pronunciation of a word. For example, spelling was as wuz does not indicate an unusual pronunciation but is used to suggest that a character has non-standard speech of some sort as well as to alter a reader's perception of a speaker.[4]

contest time:
best limerick ending in y'all'll.

[justaman]

There's a reason why dammit has an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary and damnit doesn't

Don't know where you get your sources, but in my research, the Oxford English Dictionary was the only main dictionary that didn't have an entry for "dammit".

Oxford Dictionary: http://www.askoxford.com/results/?view= ... type=exact
no results

That's because the dictionary online at askoxford.com is the Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English. It's the smallest of all the various versions of the OED (approx. 1400 pages in printed format), and as such is missing many words found in the single-volume Concise Oxford English Dictionary (approx. 1600 pages) and even more words found only in the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (approx. 22000 pages).

(I have no idea how many pages are in the 2-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.)

Quite correct there. The OED online (I have access through a uni server) has "dammit" but not "damnit". List of words between "dammit" and where "damnit" would be:

dammit
damn, n.
damn, a. and adv.
damn, v.
damnability
damnable, a.
damnableness
damnably, adv.
damnation
damnatory, a.
damned, ppl. a.
damnement, dampne-
damner
damnifiable, a.
damnific, a.
damnification
damnify, v.
damning, vbl. n.
damning, ppl. a.
damnosa hereditas

[skippyK]

I recently added the phrase "No pun intended" (and all derivatives) to the list of officially retired cliches. Technically, the usage described in the current comic would be in violation of that. However clearly this is an acceptable edge case that does not violate the reasoning and spirit of the original retirement. As arbiter of the list, I'm granting an exception for the use of "No pun intended" where no pun was actually created as long as the speaker or writer intended to create humorous cognitive dissonance by intentionally not creating a pun.

Just to be clear: Do not abuse this exception, I can take it away again.

Sincerely,
The Arbiter of Retired Phrases and Cliches.

[Phasma Felis]

Plasma Felis wrote

U no, ur rite. Speling is oll rellativ. Its sillie too worie ey lott abowt it.Wee shud oll just lyeten upp!

Well, spelling hardly matters if your reading comprehension is so poor that that's what you think I said!

Well, your argument was not terribly clear. I'd narrowed it down to one of "bad spelling is fine", or "bad spelling is fine as long as you only get one letter wrong", or "I am going to bitch at Americans for spelling this word wrong even though it's spelled exactly the same way in British English". None of them really made sense, so I picked the one that led to the most amusing response.

[Soultaker~]

I like it, but the author is actually saying that they care deeply whether the pun was intended or not, which sort of contradicts Soultaker~'s (wow putting an apostrophe after a tilde is weird) assertion that nobody cares.

Hey, that's just Maddox's assertion, not mine, though I like to read his rants.

Obviously people do care or we wouldn't have this discussion. Personally I think pointing out puns in writing is lame, mainly from the viewpoint that people should edit their writing. So if you notice an unintended pun, either take the effort to rewrite your sentence, or decide to leave it in, at which point you can't claim its presence is unintended anymore. Pointing out the pun is much like explaining a joke; it ruins it.

[plod]

I think if you notice a pun after you have written something it is acceptable to say "no pun intended" afterwards, but don't try to pretend that you didn't intend a pun when you knew full well you were going to make one, because people will just think you're a tit.

[irishnut]

just on the note of the whole "no pun intended is stupid" convorsation... its only stupid when you type it out, in normal convorsation, while speaking, you realize you just SAID a pun, then say 'no pun intended' cause otherwise people might assume you were trying to make a joke at an unappropriate time. Still necessary, stop bitching and moaning about it when its necessary.

sidenote, i will now start using it to fuck with people's heads...oh how i love randals hobbies lol

p.s. dammit!

[phlip]

Personally I think pointing out puns in writing is lame, mainly from the viewpoint that people should edit their writing.

The thing is, the writing in, say, a forum post is quite conversational... so you use a lot of idioms that make sense for spoken language, and less for formal language. (I know I personally use a hell of a lot of ellipses, where a stream-of-consciousness-style conversation would have me pausing to think of what to say next.) This often includes putting afterthoughts after the main sentences, instead of going back and editing them in... going back and editing does happen, more so than is possible with spoken word, but not as much as formal writing. And that can include "no pun intended"... which in casual writing means something along the lines of "heh, I didn't mean to write that... I'm going to leave it in, 'cause I think it's funny, but I want to point out that I didn't go out of my way to add the pun in... I'm just so awesome that these things happen all by themselves" (as opposed to when spoken, when it just means "oh, I didn't realise that was a pun until I said it, then I spotted it, yay me").

[GodShapedBullet]

just on the note of the whole "no pun intended is stupid" convorsation... its only stupid when you type it out, in normal convorsation, while speaking, you realize you just SAID a pun, then say 'no pun intended' cause otherwise people might assume you were trying to make a joke at an unappropriate time. Still necessary, stop bitching and moaning about it when its necessary.

sidenote, i will now start using it to fuck with people's heads...oh how i love randals hobbies ¡This cheese is burning me!

p.s. dammit!

Agreed. If you are writing and you didn't intend on having a pun you made, get rid of it. Easy enough. If you are talking you don't have that luxury. You can't undo the past.

However, if you have a time machine, you should never say "no pun intended."

[tehol]

=/

My word corrects "Dammit you!" to "Damnit you!"

FireFox languages doesn't, but still... that's a little odd, doncha think?

[Mavrisa]

According to this, it's much more one-sided. http://googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=dammit+-%22blink+182%22&word2=damnit

Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of damnit's results come from Blink 182 as well: http://googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=dammit+-%22blink+182%22&word2=damnit+-%22blink+182%22

So basically people just suck at spelling, even if there is a 100% sure way to spell it (being the name of a song and all, there can't exactly be a debate - no pun intended)

[WhoisBadWolf]

I never really got the point of saying "no pun intended". I mean, if you were aware of your pun enough to say that, then obviously you intended to make the pun, right?

Two, two contrabasses replying. Ha ha ha.

Unless you are like my mother who makes very good puns without intending to and then doesn't realize till we start laughing uncontrollably.

[BennyHill]

According to this, it's much more one-sided. http://googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=dammit+-%22blink+182%22&word2=damnit

Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of damnit's results come from Blink 182 as well: http://googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=dammit+-%22blink+182%22&word2=damnit+-%22blink+182%22

So basically people just suck at spelling, even if there is a 100% sure way to spell it (being the name of a song and all, there can't exactly be a debate - no pun intended)

I guess you can make the name of a song anything you want, i use dammit but alot of people I know use damnit (damn then it) to be "grammically correct". Not like dammit is gramically correct in the first place.

Oh, and no pun intended.

[GrandPubah]

So basically people just suck at spelling, even if there is a 100% sure way to spell it (being the name of a song and all, there can't exactly be a debate - no pun intended)

I have to disagree with that sentiment. Quiet Riot released a song some years ago, you may or may not remember, entitled "Cum On Feel The Noize", and I have yet to meet anyone who would argue that 'noise' should be spelled with a 'z'. Musicians commonly misspell track titles (intentionally or otherwise, who knows?), but this doesn't mean that the modified words take that form for the general public.

Such an argument would be ludacris.

[phlip]

How many is that now in the "My Hobby:" series?

Go go gadget search engine
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Honourable mentions: 1 2

[Kdz]

Zales Jewelry recently ran ads that said "Love Rocks". Which is the verb and which is the noun? It depends on whether you're a romantic or a cynic.

fix'd
And thus ends my burn on the exploitation of marriage by business. Like it was even necessary.

[Kdz]

So basically people just suck at spelling, even if there is a 100% sure way to spell it (being the name of a song and all, there can't exactly be a debate - no pun intended)

I have to disagree with that sentiment. Quiet Riot released a song some years ago, you may or may not remember, entitled "Cum On Feel The Noize", and I have yet to meet anyone who would argue that 'noise' should be spelled with a 'z'. Musicians commonly misspell track titles (intentionally or otherwise, who knows?), but this doesn't mean that the modified words take that form for the general public.

Such an argument would be ludacris.

What he's saying is that apparently a lot of people were looking for the Blink182 song 'Dammit,' but were searching the term 'Damnit.' In this case, because it is a title, the spelling is definite. I don't think he was referring to the word in general, but the title specifically.