Cortically Magnified

The Economist is probably not the best place to look for rigorous scholarship on comparative punnology, but a recent article did ask a very good question: Why English is such a great language for puns? I am not sure if the superiority of English in punning is that obvious, but the argument seems to be convincing: For English is unusually good for puns. It has a large vocabulary and a rich stock of homophones from which puns can be made.

I saw this book in the Melbourne Rare Book Fair. To anyone who can read Chinese, this looks like the practice book of a young child starting to learn to write. The characters are intelligible, but the writer clearly has not mastered the basic principles. If Chinese characters are people, these little guys are seriously deformed. Some have really big heads, some have tiny feet, most of them look like zombies walking with their body parts dangling, ready to fall off.