A column on writing from Editor & Publisher March 29, 1981.

Capitol Punishment

Consider this master wordplay:
An architect in prison complained that the walls were not built to scale.

A play on words, a wordplay, "is made when someone notices that one word has two different meanings and constructs a sentence containing this word (scale in their example above). The two meanings of the sentence depend on the interpretation of the ambiguous word.

A wordplay is built around one word with two meanings.

On the other hand, "a pun is made when someone notices that two different words sound the same and constructs a sentence [or phrase] containing this sound. Example: Sum fun, under a photo of kids playing with a calculator. The two meanings...depend on the interpretation of the ambiguous sound."

A pun is made of homophones (sound-alikes). Dictionaries, however, wrongly include wordplays in the definitions of puns.

Hammond and Hughes say that laughter may depend on the difference. Homonyms with the same spelling "have usually diverged in meaning from a common original meaning."

In the prison wall wordplay, both meanings of scale (to climb and in measured proportion) come from the Latin root scala (ladder). When we read it, the "divergent meanings of one root word are reunited in the play on words. Thus the play on word has a rational, erudite quality." We grin.

Puns, however, team up unrelated words that coincidentally sound alike or similar [dandelions/dandy lines]. This is enough for the punnish, who erupt whenever they hear an assonance.

"The pun has a capricious and irrational quality," declare Hughes and Hammond. We groan.

To pun or not to pun is seldom a newsroom question. Most editors encourage puns, hoping for grins, not groans In a groan pun, only one meaning applies. In a grin pun, a grow-up word play, all the meanings apply. We do grin.

My first try for a title here included Guide Lions (for Guidelines, the column name), which, however, had nothing to do with our subject. Low class, no question. A better punster than I, the editor of the TH Record, Al Romm, rescued it with the invention above, Capital Punnishment, that contains both a word play and a pun. High class, indeed.

In any high-class pun, the sense as well as the sound must work, and since a double meaning is always at work--that is, at play-- the meaning must apply in two, or more, ways.

Here's a beauty about a baker caught robbing his employer's shop:
"He kneaded the dough." If a butcher had robbed the bake shop, the pun would fail. Butchers need but don't knead.

Two meanings hit their targets in these captions:
Shear delight, under a photo of a smiling man trimming a hedge.
In vane, under a shot of a broken weather vane.

Wordplay headlines, the hardest to invent, must also have both meanings at play to make us grin:
Prison walls not to scale, claims architect convict.

Never play word games with bad news.
Fireplace is not an apt standing head for a regular column on local fires.
• Watch out for unintentional wordplays.
  Anyone can miss a double entendre because the simplest first-grade words have off-color meanings. Pussy, balls, etc., etc.

• Watch for a pun in the lead paragraph.
  Be sure the headline does not step on the writer's punsettias and dandy lions.

Ethel Grodzins Romm is a writer and editor currently living in New York City. She is the author of The Open Conspiracy: What America's Angry Generation is Saying (review) (auction with cover), several of the Strategies in Reading workbook series and others. She appeared in the film Paranormal: Science or Pseudoscience? She has written columns on language for Editor & Publisher, The American Bar Association Journal and many others. She is currently working on a book on management.