Punish the Pundits
I found this article in the NY Times. An absolute slander on puns. Honestly, I felt a little offended – an avid fan of puns (read pj’s) that I am. The author, Joe Tartakovsky, is a student at Fordham Law School. My initial reaction was that the author might have had a pretty rough day at school, may be with his prof. Grad school can be pretty hard on people, I can vouch for that.
Later on I felt that he tried to cram many, some very funny, puns in such ‘pun’y space. It could be that he might have screwed up his date with some back fired puns. And as a result, like they say in my mother tongue Telugu, pallu raali untayi – meaning, might have lost his teeth or his teeth might have fallen off. Note: pallu is plural of ‘pun’nu (tooth) in Telugu. It then seemed apparent that all these teeth (pallu) have been collected and wrapped into a copy of NY Times.
I googled further for more info about Joe and found another scathing attack, this time on math in Forbes. The arguments in that article were, no wonder, pretty illogical and naive. After reading a couple more of his articles it seemed like, without referring to any political “color” (pun intended), he just speaks his mind right out. Sorry, I can be color blind at times…
Before I lose any of my teeth let me finish this post. Personally I feel that puns are a result of lateral thinking. Lateral thinking, as opposed to vertical thinking, is something similar to thinking outside-the-box. Humans, unlike computers, can solve some complex problems by the use of intuitive ideas. We can provide ad-hoc solutions for which we cannot immediately give a proper line of procedural reasoning i.e. a set of rules that are often taught to us in schools. Surprisingly enough, sometimes I found that lateral thinking helps a lot in computer programming – which is in effect solving bits of math problems. But it is about perceiving the problem in a different way.
It might not be an unrelated argument that a country with far less programmers does not appreciate British comedy much which is fraught with puns.
A very nice article on lateral thinking is a transcript of a lecture by Edward de Bono
I sign off with a now-famous-among-my-friends quote:
Time flies like an arrow
Fruit flies like a banana
Sound of musig 