Page 27 - The Language of Humour

14 ‘I SAY, I SAY, I SAY’
There are accidental howlers caused by misspelling, collected by
teachers and displayed for general amusement: ‘They lived in huts and
there was rush mating on the floor.’ The ‘Lost Consonants’ series of
cartoons in the Guardian (by Graham Rawle) relies on the pleasure of
seeing how the omission of a single letter can create absurd new
meanings.

It would ruin his career if the sandal hit the headlines.
Andrew Lloyd-Webber writes another hit musical!

Acronyms are words formed from the initial letters of other words.
They are so common today—organisations try to find a catchy title that
will stick in the mind—that this tendency itself is mocked in the
following comments.

What we need to use is courtesy, respect and patience—CRAP.
(Brittas Empire)
‘I think there are too many TLA’s.’
‘What’s a TLA?’
‘A Three Letter Abbreviation.’

Activity

Collect examples of written humour which depend on the visual
representation of the language. Group them into categories.

Morphology
Morphology refers to the way that individual words are formed. A
morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of sense. Many words are
simply made up of a single morpheme and cannot be split down into
smaller parts, for example ‘table’. Other words are clearly more
complex and formed from a number of units, for example
‘antidisestablishmentarianism’, which has the prefixes ‘anti-’ and ‘dis-’
and the suffixes ‘-ment’, ‘-arian’ and ‘-ism’. People’s instinctive
knowledge of the ways that morphemes are used to form meanings can
be exploited in jokes which point out the possible ambiguities.
The same sound, or the same group of letters, can be a word or a
bound morpheme (prefix or suffix) or a syllable, depending on the
context. Think, for example, of the different morphological structure of
the words ‘childhood’ and ‘rainhood’, where ‘hood’ is a suffix