Tuesday, September 13, 2022

"Pun not intended"

Some people think that an outcome of an action foreseen with practical certainty is also intended. If so, then pretty much every case where someone writes “pun not intended” is a case where what they write is false. For one foresees with practical certainty that by disseminating the message one is punning.

7 comments:

TP said...

I sometimes say "no pun intended" when I don't see one there. Just in case.

No Pun Intended.

Alexander R Pruss said...

I bet you get a lot of puzzled looks. :-)

Walter Van den Acker said...

Alex

If someone writes 'no pun intented' then they mean that when they were writing the words they were not intending the pun, IOW,. they did not foresee with practical certainty that what they we're writing could be seen as a pun.

Alexander R Pruss said...

Walter:

I think not always. Sometimes one writes something and there is no way, without excessive awkwardness, of expressing something without a pun. You're writing a history piece about how many scientists in the 19th century came from the nobility, and then you need to mention some experiments about noble gases. What can you do?

Walter Van den Acker said...

Alex

'Sometimes' is not the same as 'in pretty much every case.'

Alexander R Pruss said...

Yeah, but in most of the remainder of the cases, even though I didn't foresee that I would be punning by writing the text, once I noticed the pun, I foresaw that I would be punning by "disseminating" the text (say, by clicking on "Publish").

Walter Van den Acker said...

Yes, but in that case, the pun is intended., and what 'no pun intended' actually means is, 'When I originally wrote these words, I did not intend them as a pun.'
Let's say you come to visit me and I prepare a meal for you. When the meal is ready, I realize that, instead of salt, I accidently used a toxic powder. Yet I still give you the meal(obviously, I don't eat).
Would you say I did not intend to poison you?