PUN. A pun has been defined by Addison (` Spectator,' No. 61) to be "a conceit arising from the use of two words that agree in the sound but differ in the sense." Sometimes, however, the pun is effected by the employment of only one word, which is susceptible of a double application ; as when one who had undertaken to pun upon any subject that should be given him, on being desired to make a pun on the king, answered that the king was no subject. Sometimes, too, the sound that is thus made to convey two ideas at once is not an entire word, but only a syllable. The definition, moreover, to be com plete, ought to have explained in what the effect of the conceit consists. It appears to be, as we have just hinted, in the novelty and unex pectedness of the signification or application presented by the puu—a novelty which always at least produces surprise, and often the livelier titillation of a grotesque or otherwise ludicrous image.
A sketch of the history of puns has been given by Addison in a well known paper in the `Spectator' (No. 61), iu which he traces the exist ence of the practice from the time of Aristotle downward. The figures of speech or turns of expression known among the Greeks by the names of the paragramma (rapcf-ypappa), and the paronomasia (raprovopacria), the a nta aaclasis (&rravdtrAaa is), and the p161•e (rXodi), were often merely what we should now call puns. Addison observes that Aristotle, in
the eleventh chapter of his 'Rhetoric,' describes different kinds of puns or paragrams, among the beauties of good writing, and produces instances of them out of some of the greatest authors in the Greek tongue. We may also refer to another very clever paper in the (No. 36), attributed to a writer of the name of Birch, which contains what is called ' A Modest Apology for Punning.' In the introduction to this paper the distinction is happily enough drawn between the extemporaneous puns of conversation and the punning in deliberate and grave compositions, which in this country, in tho early part of the l'ith century, used to be reckoned eloquence and fine writing. "I look," says the author, "upon premeditated quibbles and puns committed to the press, as unpardonable crimes. There is as much difference betwixt these and the starts in common discourse as betwixt casual rencontres and murder with malice prepense."