Punpedia – The Online Encyclopedia of Puns | Hacker News Reader

Punpedia – The Online Encyclopedia of Puns

punpedia.org

215 pointscurtis54 comments

I sat down one day and wrote some great puns and submitted them to this site. I just checked how many got published. Really disappointed, because it seems that no pun in ten did...

(sorry)

What does my karma have to be before I get a downvote option, asking for myself.

500 last time I looked

Is downvoting submissions a thing?

Never.

I thought so, but then who knows what magic powers are granted to the upper echelons with 10000+ points.

Well, the official rule says "no". But we can never know if @dang had secretly granted it. It's what makes HN having a bit of mythical fun ;-)

At 10,000 karma, the downvote option gets taken away again. Then you need to get 500,000 karma to get it back.

Also, you can "flag". But I think it's only reserved for taking down partisan politics and flamewars (or other politically unpopular posts in Silicon Valley's standards), not (and I think should not) used for other purposes.

But I guess there's nothing to prevent you from doing it anyway, the guideline says,

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about [...]

So yeah, feel free to flag, it's not abuse. The automatic threshold rule and the moderators have a final saying.

I think it's 1000 now

It's between 500 (excl.) and 600 (incl.) as of last week. I saw the down arrows appear.

It's 501.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606199

You'd only be undoing my upvote anyway.

A number towards which this comment does not help you to go, apparently.

Here's a more uplifting pun. https://imgur.com/a/DtTIzU7

They could have called it wittypedia, but they didn’t.

Someone somewhere is having an aneurysm after reading this.

Many years ago, in another life, I knew this guy who worked in TV. He still works professionally so lets call him Orwell. One of Or’s first jobs was working on the special makeup for Star Trek : The Next Generation and boy did he have some stories. I always assumed that you just slap on a rubber mask and maybe a bit of glue and start the cameras running but apparently it is a lot more complex.

Depending on the lighting and any requirements for special effects (done optically back then), there were a lot of calculations to do in order to make the make up look consistent between shots. Simple things like the choice of foundation were very important.

Orwell used to tell me that he dreaded outdoor shoots the most. He would be feverishly working away with a light-meter and his formula when the producer would arrive on the location demanding to know why dozens of very expensive cast and crew were just standing around. The answer was always then same, they were waiting ‘ere Or’s tabulating Data’s base complexion.

Oh, are we doing this?

So the tariffs to China ends up expanding to the Eastern Rim and the supply of parts to repair Japanese cars dries up. Overnight a black market forms and parts smuggling is a lucrative business. Somewhere over the heartland of America a DC3 develops engine trouble and the pilot says they have to lose weight ASAP.

The smuggler opens the side door and starts pushing the crates out which fortunately were going to be parachute dropped anyway. A few minutes later a farmer on his way to his outhouse looks up and reads the label off a crate and says "My God, it's raining Datsun cogs!"

So this guy (let's call him George) goes into his dentist's office, because of pain in his mouth. The dentist takes a look and quickly sees that the plate he installed just six months before is severely corroded, so he asks George about his diet. It turns out George loves eggs Benedict, and eats them for breakfast every morning.

The dentist realizes what's happening now - the lemon juice in George's breakfast is corroding the dental work. The dentist recommends replacing the dental plate with a chrome model, because everyone knows there's no plate like chrome for the hollandaise.

The depth and amount of tenuous word association is amazing. I went in expecting another dad joke list. I came out with something like a thematic/"sounds like" thesaurus. I feel so much potential here for brainstorming ideas for creative writing (while not actually using any of the puns).

This was my exact reaction! I was expecting a bad jokes list and instead, I forwarded this awesome link to my stepkids with a "pay up or I share with your father" threat :-)

Has anyone made a keyboard app that suggests or/and auto-corrects messages to incorporate puns?

Or it'd be neat to have an app that, before sending a text message, would suggest pun-nier versions.

As a non-native English speaker, I'm always specially proud when I come up with a pun.

I wonder how prevalent puns are in other languages, it seems they are extremely prevalent in English or at least in British English but hardly at all in Spanish.

I've seen/heard some in German but not sure how prevalent.

A lot of Chinese superstitions are based around puns. Like how it’s a bad idea to give a clock as a gift, because “sending a clock” sounds like “sending someone off to their funeral” in mandarin.

4 is a bad number because it sounds like “death.”

Tall buildings tend to omit floors 4, 14, etc., the way tall buildings in the US often omit floor 13. Amusingly, Chinese building often omit 13 as well. So you might be on floor 15 and only really be on floor 12 because 4, 13, and 14 are all left out.

Less dire numeric associations are 55 for crying (pronounced “wuwu”) and 88 for bye-bye (“baba”).

In Brazilian Portuguese there are several, so many that one gets tired... The 'pun' word itself, in BP means 'fart' (pum) which creates a lot of interesting jokes. For example, we have a tart called 'empanada' - an advertsing shout 'Para que serve uma barriga vazia, ein? Pá nada!' - 'what an empty belly is good for, huh? For nothing!'. (it's impossible to explain a pun...)

> A tart is a baked dish consisting of a filling over a pastry base with an open top not covered with pastry.

Thank you for the information on Brazilian puns, however I cannot let someone call an empanada a "tart", a tart must be open, whereas an empanada must be covered.

pendant

All pendants must be hung?

You got it!

I don't know Portuguese, but from what I can understand the pun translates perfectly to Spanish. Incidentally, pun also translates to fart.

– ¿Para qué sirve una barriga vacía? – Em, ¡Pa' nada!"

Puns (dajare) form a huge part of Japanese humor, much aided by the fact that the language has an enormous amount of homophones.

https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese-puns/

I have very limited Thai, but one cross language pun that was always amusing is that the word commonly used for a bad smell sounds like "men" - เหม็น (Google translates it as "foul", but I've only heard it used specifically in relation to smells).

In French, puns are called calembours and are huge. All major writers left behind some puns. There are some famous songwriters specializing in puns. Alphonse Allais was probably the master of them all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holorime

The website says it's having technical difficulties. In hindsight this is probably true in the literal sense, but because of the inherent cruelty of puns, I've been puzzling over it for a few minutes trying to figure out if it's just an elaborate pun I don't get yet.

I love that 'Pirate Puns' is listed under the 'Jobs' section. I never see 'Pirate' in the options when applying for a mortgage or car insurance but I think that perhaps it should be.

it's a cor-pirate occupation

That’d make me [p] irate

What if their services were offered at pi-rates?

You'd see it more if you look in finance. Outside of tax season, you can frequently see them at H & Arrrrrr Block.

Well, we crashed the database. That's not very punny.

Yes, very disapunting.

For anyone in the NYC area, check out Punderdome tomorrow night! https://www.facebook.com/punderdome

(Disclaimer: I'm a puntenstant)

Their taxonomy reminds me of the one from Borges's "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole...

Didn’t see OCaml mentioned in the camel puns

You didn't see OCaml in the lisp?

My favourite pun is due to it being English/Spanish bilingual, but for a different part of the word.

"Do cats go to heaven?"

English A: No, they go to PURRgatory.

Spanish A: No, se van al purGATOrio.

What am I going to do with all these foot puns?

Too much traffic killed the site!

"Error establishing a bouillabaisse concoction."

Pun-baiting HN?

Well, I do hear he's a master baiter.

IF YOU READ THIS YOU WILL GO BALD.

... oh wait, sorry that wasn't very punny.

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