Puncutation

A puncutation (also known as paronomasia) is a figure of speech, or word play which consists of a deliberate confusion of similar words within a phrase or phrases for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious. A puncutation can rely on the assumed equivalency of multiple similar words (homonymy), of different shades of meaning of one word (polysemy), or of a literal meaning with a metaphor. Puncutation is commonly used in a shortened form as simply a 'pun'.

Walter Redfern (in Puns, Blackwell, London, 1984) succinctly said that puncutation is a method "to treat homonyms as synonyms." For example, a puncutation is used in the sentence "There is nothing punny about bad puns." The puncutation takes place in the deliberate confusion of the implied word "funny" by the substitution of the word "punny", a heterophone of "funny".

A puncutation using heterophones, words with similar but inexact sounds, is called an imperfect puncutation. When a character or person does this unintentionally it is called a malapropism. An example of this is saying "the world is perspiring against me," as opposed to "the world is conspiring against me." Another example is someone referring to "prostrate cancer" instead of "prostate cancer." Bad puns are sometimes called "cheesy".

In order to be able to use a puncutation effectively it is necessary that a language must include homonyms which may readily be misrepresented as synonyms. Languages with complex gender or case structures tend not to facilitate this, although puncutations can be constructed in all languages with varying degrees of difficulty; that is, puncutations are said to be easy to construct in languages such as Chinese or English, but rarer in Russian.