Every possible pun of the form ‘You put the X in Y’ | Hacker News Reader

Every possible pun of the form ‘You put the X in Y’

locserendipity.com

76 pointswestcort89 comments

>YOU PUT THE BITCH IN OBITUARY.

Welp, I have to say it's a resounding success.

I got: YOU PUT THE BISCH IN AMBITION :)

Oh lordy, I've got a thing to say about your Javascript.

You could keep the word pairs server side and retrieve them as the page is accessed... or at the very least if you're going to store all your data in a static file you could store them in an array to save space, instead of the whole links. You could get real fancy and make some kind of soundex map thing.

Question: did you just break each word into syllables, and find soundex matches?

No worries, though, I like the compulsive punning. I just like talking about things on the internet.

What the...

Is that a function with a 560000+ lines long comment inside of it, that gets turned into a string, then sliced, and split on newlines, then assigned to a global variable that gets used in another global function?

It took a minute just to open the source code in my browser. Chrome used 5.2GB of RAM while viewing the source code, just for that tab.

This is one of those things I would have just assumed was impossible, so never would have tried. Not that I should try something like this, mind, but it is a good reminder not to underestimate these machines we have.

Yeah! Just goes to show you can make a cool thing that is really quick and dirty under the hood.

You could make this page load instantly by making the random selection happen in the backend instead of in the browser, but then I guess it would no longer just be a static file.

You could also just have a compact array of pairs and then generate the sentences in the browser instead of having half a million pre-generated strings.

I just did string matching (on about 7.6 billion items 133000^2) and matched the pronunciation portion. It’s a fun lark.

I feel that to really make this work you would need to filter words with common origins. Like, if one word appears in the dictionary definition of the other word, they likely aren't going to be funny.

Examples:

YOU PUT THE REFINE IN REFINERY.

YOU PUT THE DETECT IN DETECTS.

YOU PUT THE POLYTECHNOLOGY IN POLYTECHNOLOGIES.

But words with no commonality at all and a good rhyme are brilliant.

YOU PUT THE RUDENESS IN SHREWDNESS.

Hmm, rhymes don't really do it for me. I might even filter out rhymes if I built this. I've heard humans use this format often enough, and I don't think I've ever heard someone use a rhyme. It's just too easy. Putting "the cologne in colonialism" is significantly better.

Yeah, I think the currently allows 1-phoneme differences. I think it would be better if it only allowed 2-3+ phoneme differences when at the end of the word. -s -ies -y arent interesting suffixes.

I'd have missed "YOU PUT THE ARRAY IN ARRAYS", which felt apt.

There are also some that are just nonsensical but when you read a dozen of these in a row, they feel actually kind of funny. Just tunes your brain to a different wavelength.

Removing perfect nouns for the "in Y" part might also help.

I'm going to stick with my favorites.

Put the romance in necromancer and

Put the fun in dysfunctional.

“Gee, boss, you really know how to put the fun in funeral.”—Harley Quinn

Got "man in romance" and thinking about chaining a few of these together now.

These are the best

Great!

Wow, some of these are really unique and would be EASILY missed by simpler string matching. I had to read some out-loud to understand

Faves:

> YOU PUT THE OUGHT IN WATERCOLORS.

> YOU PUT THE REITAN IN FRIGHTENED.

> YOU PUT THE EFFICIENTLY IN INEFFICIENTLY . > YOU PUT THE BORED IN DEBORD.

> YOU PUT THE FARAH IN PHEROMONES. (!!?)

> YOU PUT THE DICKS IN DICTIONARIES

This is great! Just wish it was possible to filter out uncommon words. I have no idea what half of them means or how they're supposed to be pronounced (non-native).

> > YOU PUT THE FARAH IN PHEROMONES. (!!?)

"Farah" and "phero-" are both pronounced ˈfɛrə ("fair-ruh").

"We wonder Mr. Babbage does not invent a punning engine; it is just as possible as a calculating one."

--Walter Bagehot, "The First Edinburgh Reviewers", an essay of 1855. You can find the essay at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101068581279&vi... .

[Edit: removed stray colon.]

This is amazing! I guess we have gone full circle.

This also ties in to the other thing locserendipity.com does. It is a corpus of all pre-1918 books. Just use site:locserendipity.com in Google.

> YOU PUT THE EXACT IN INEXACT.

This reminds me of precision vs accuracy.

Can't wait to use that one someday.

Good one!

Some de-stemming would make these work a lot better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming

Definitely something I could do with a quick regex. Great idea!

YOU PUT THE CON IN CONGRESS.

Ooooh. Topical.

Edit: also YOU PUT THE ERICA IN AMERICA. That's adorable.

Since you're already on the dad joke train, what's the opposite of "con"-gress? Progress.

The latter was in Stranger Things: "You can't spell America without Erica"

Maybe they should do a You Can't Spell X without Y snowclone generator next.

Detractors of the popular genre of music often trot out the old adage "you can't spell crap without rap", but what most people fail to realize is that you can't spell fish and chip shop without hip hop.

> YOU PUT THE CON IN CONGRESS.

If the opposite of pro is con then the opposite is progress is...

This reminds me of the time I needed to generate some names for testing, and I simply combined the Social Security list of most common first and last names at random. It turns out that the vast majority of possible name combinations are terrible. Not quite "Sleve McDichael" from the notorious Super Famicon game, but close.

Like this, I could read through a whole page of names before finding one that scans. Bennett Takeshita, e.g., is effectively unpronounceable.

https://www.avclub.com/check-out-these-wonderful-american-na...

I like this idea!

It would be neat to let people vote up and down to give some social value component.

Good idea!

"YOU PUT THE RHEAULT IN CROSSNO"

"YOU PUT THE OUGHT IN REAUTHORIZE"

I'm not positive what's going on here, but it seems like it's incorrectly detecting syllable divisions? If it thinks that the division is between "o" and "s" in the first and between "t" and "h" in the second, those results would make sense. I don't think anyone actually pronounces "reauthorize" like "warthog", though...

6 winners among a sea of .. not .. winners.

You put the SCENES in Francine's.

You put the DORIS in Maquiladoras.

You put the UNDER in underwriting.

You put the SOMETHING in Twentysomethings.

And the two actual puns:

You put the RACY in Gracie.

You put the BROAD in Broadway.

You put the KILLED in unskilled

"You put the Dinosaur in Dinosaurs"

Get outta here!

I got YOU PUT THE SWAYZE IN SWAYZE.

There really needs to be a filter to block these kinds of results.

I wish the word links would let me navigate the set of puns rather than going to google. X links should let me see all the combos that have the same word in the X position. Y links should do the same thing, mutatis mutandis.

My favorite lexical pun, but not auditory, is "You put the laughter into slaughter".

Some of these are a bit suspect...

> YOU PUT THE OOOHS IN DEPOSE

Just encountered > YOU PUT THE )PARENS IN (BEGIN-PARENS. Although arguably more of a feature than a bug

Yeah, it doesn't look like it's just string matching.

    YOU PUT THE MINNER IN PETROMINERALS. 
    YOU PUT THE GUINN IN GINSU. 
    YOU PUT THE READER IN TREDER.

Seems like doing it "wrong" like this would actually be harder? I'm a bit confused.

They seem to be accent dependent.

I'll add my favorite:

You put the 'b' in subtle.

Looks pretty great. If someone is looking to do something similar the NLTK has a library with mappings to the pronunciation or you can use soundex. I used the NLTK library for answering "How many rhymes are there in English"[1] but the phonemes were in a different format than IPA.

I don't know if there is something similar to the NLTK library with the mappings but for IPA

[1] https://medium.com/@the_ajohnston/how-many-rhymes-are-there-...

Third result:

> YOU PUT THE WHICHEVER IN WHICHEVER.

Technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.

"YOU PUT THE {BRACE IN {OPEN-BRACE" takes the cake

You put the RUSTED in DISTRUSTED.

You put the PYHRRIC in EMPIRICALLY.

You put the ALLAH in CLIMATOLOGIST.

You put the ICING in ENTICING.

You put the SCENT in DISINCENTIVE.

It includes names though, which are almost never interesting:

You put the REECE in RECENTLY.

Is there a way to search in the list? I want to see if it has caught "put chalk in chocolate" (typically used regarding to Hershey's).

View source and you can see all of them

Thanks. I see that it does include it.

YOU PUT THE MARTYR IN SMARTER.

nice

Also,

YOU PUT THE NATION IN EXTERMINATION.

YOU PUT THE SEWER IN PURSUER.

YOU PUT THE SIGH IN UNDECIDED.

YOU PUT THE ARREST IN OVERESTIMATE.

YOU PUT THE TROLL IN UNCONTROLLED.

YOU PUT THE GODLESS IN IRREGARDLESS. (Kinda need a Boston accent for this one)

I had calculated the square of the number of words in the dictionary and was disappointed to see that some were missing on the site.

Just used CMUDICT 0.7 which had 133000 or so entries, so there could be others if you used the OED. I did learn a lot of words from this though

Good start--now if you can only make them funny.

As a compulsive punner I object to the expectation they're supposed to be funny.

I pun for mental stimulation, and to make everyone around me cringe.

Add a thumbs-up/down button, train a neural net. Easy peasy.

I noticed there's a few cases where a th sound puns with a t sound. For example, you put the OUGHT in ROTHMEYER. Intentional due to loose matching? Uncertainty in pronunciations? Or is this a bug where the θ phoneme is represented as the digraph th?

I just did an index of match, so the t from th could have matched. It was quick and dirty, but it’s just for fun, so please forgive those

I like it! I started making a similar kind of page before as a brainstorming challenge: "noun is like a noun".

2 people could sit in front of the screen, and the first person to guess how the nouns are similar would win the point.

http://peterburk.github.io/programs/nounIsLikeANoun/index.ht...

I'd also like to make a pun dictionary of similar-sounding words in English & Chinese, using the data I already gathered for Pingtype.

What pronunciation dictionary did you use?

I've been looking for a good one that 1. includes variant pronunciations, and 2. distinguishes all phonemes, e.g. considers Rosa's and roses distinct. So far I haven't found any that fulfill these criteria.

I used CMUDICT v0.7

I love it, but I don't know a lot of these words!

If the author is reading I think a nice small improvement would be to prefix the Google search with "define" (as in: "define ${word}") to invoke Google's dictionary function.

Great idea! I was not aware if that!

Amusing, although you should remove examples where Y is just the plural of X. I got "You put the rooftop in rooftops."

Even worse, "you put the climatologists in climatologist".

Still, I love when small people silly personal projects get promoted in HN. We should have more of these.

It has my favorite one, which I've actually heard used in conversation in the South:

YOU PUT THE DICK IN DIXIELAND

Might be worth pointing out for any mobile users that PunGenLink.html is a hefty 93mb download.

Did you include:

"You put the foo in bar?"

Fun lark, I laughed at some. Wondered at some others.

Would be good to prioritize popular words, if that data is out there.

Saw one that makes sense "You put the insel in tinseltown".

"You put the laughter in slaughter"

Please tell me this one is in there...

I read the site as loserendipity.com and thought it was a nice pun.

A couple of these actually made me laugh out loud. Nice job!

Thanks! It makes my day that this could make someone laugh!

YOU PUT THE I IN TEAM

I probably screwed that up. Oops, I just made that up.

Well, you know what they say: "There's no 'I' in 'TEAM,' but there's always room for you in the 'A'-hole."

Never heard that. Pretty funny! Thanks!

Ah, nice.

(mutters to self) another project I did not complete.

> YOU PUT THE SPORT IN TRANSPORTING.

This is a nice one.

Did you put the French in some fries?

YOU PUT THE WHEELCHAIR IN WHEELCHAIR.

Might want to exclude this kind of trivial case.

YOU PUT THE SIMPSON IN SIMPSON'S. Thanks

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