Page 30 - The Language of Humour

‘I SAY, I SAY, I SAY’ 17
words, which originate from different sources and so have a separate
entry in the dictionary. A fishmonger who calls him/herself a ‘Sole
Trader’ is referring to the two meanings for the word ‘sole’: one comes
from the Latin ‘solum’ meaning ‘bottom’ or ‘pavement’, so is used to
name the bottom of a shoe or a fish with a similar shape; the other
comes from the Latin word ‘solus’ meaning ‘alone’. This is slightly
different from the fact that a single word like ‘skip’ can have various
related meanings, referred to as polysemy (see below.) Often it is hard
to know whether something is a homonym or a polyseme, without
consulting a good etymological dictionary.

What makes a tree noisy? Its bark.

This example counts as a homonym, as the dictionary lists ‘bark’ under
two separate entries: the sound of a dog from the Old English ‘beorcan’
and the other from Old Norse ‘borkr’, perhaps related to ‘birch’.
As mentioned above, polysemy refers to the phenomenon of words
having various, related meanings. Unintentional humour can occur in
translations, as it is hard even for a good dictionary to explain all the
subtle distinctions between the uses and senses of a word. For example,
a notice in the toilet of an Italian train gave instructions for its use:

Deeply depress the stud.

English speakers rarely use the literal meaning of ‘depress’=press
down, so the metaphorical sense is the first to be understood,
particularly as it occurs before ‘stud’, which can mean both a ‘knob’ or
a ‘young man noted for his sexual prowess’.
Prepositions in any language are polysemous, in that their use covers
a wide range of meanings, which need to be defined in the context in
which they occur. Prepositions often occur as part of fixed phrases, or
idioms (see below), which cannot be understood by the meaning of the
individual parts. In an episode of the sitcom Friends there was an
exchange between Ross and Rachel, who had been on the brink of a
relationship throughout the series. Rachel had left a message on Ross’s
answerphone, which he comments on in a literal way:
You said you were over me. When were you ever under me?
Phrasal verbs are sometimes referred to as ‘multi-word’ verbs.
Some verbs in English are not single words but include a following
preposition (or particle) as the unit of sense. The following contrasting
pairs of sentences should help to make the distinction clear between a