Letter-Perfect Grammar Puns
Letter-Perfect Grammar Puns
By Richard Lederer
A consonant walks into a bar and sits down next to a vowelly girl.
"Hi!" he says. "I'll alphabet that you've never been here before."
"Of cursive I have," she replies. "I come here, like, all the time.
For me, it's parse for the course."
The consonant remains stationery, enveloped by the vowelly girl's
letter-perfect charm.
"Here's a cute joke" he states declaratively. "Up at the North Pole,
St. Nicholas is the main Claus. His wife is a relative Claus. His
children are dependent Clauses. Their Dutch uncle is a restrictive
Claus. And Santa's elves are subordinate Clauses. As a group, they're
all re noun Clauses."
Then he lays on some more dashes of humour: "Have you heard about the
fellow who had half his digestive tract removed? He walked around with
a semi-colon."
"Are you like pre positioning me?" asks the vowelly girl.
"I won't be indirect. You are the object of my preposition. Your
beauty phrase my nerves. Won't you come up to my place for a
coordinating conjunction?"
"I don't want to be diacritical of you, but you're like, such a
boldfaced character!" replies the vowelly girl. "Like do I have to
spell it out to you, or are you just plain comma-tose? You're not my
type, so get off my case!"
Despite his past perfect, he is, at present, tense.
"Puhleeze, gag me with a spoonerism!" she objects. "As my Grammar and
other correlatives used to say, your mind is in the guttural. I resent
your umlautish behaviour. You should know what the wages of syntax
are. I nominative absolutely decline to conjugate with you fersure!"
"You get high quotation marks for that one," he smiles, "even if I
think you're being rather subjunctive and moody about all this. I so
admire your figure of speech that I would like to predicate my life on
yours." So he gets himself into an indicative mood and says, "It would
be appreciated by me if you would be married to me."
"Are you being passive aggressive?" she asks interrogatively.
"No, I'm speaking in the active voice. Please don't have a vowel
movement about this. I simile want to say to you, 'Metaphors be with
you!' I would never want to change you and become a misplaced
modifier. It's imperative that you understand that I'm very, very font
of you and want us to spend infinitive together."
"That's quite a complement," she blushes -- and gives him appositive response.
At the ceremonies they exchange wedding vowels about the compound
subject of marriage.
Finally, they say, "I do," which is actually the longest and most
complex of sentences -- a run-on sentence, actually -- one that we all
hope won't turn out to be a sentence fragment.
Then the minister diagrams that sentence and says, "I now pronouns you
consonant and vowel."
They kiss each other on the ellipsis and whisper to each other, "I
love you, noun forever."
Throughout their marriage, their structure is perfectly parallel and
their verbs never disagree with their subjects.
After many a linking verve, comma splice and interjection, they
conceive the perfect parent thesis. Then come some missing periods and
powerful contractions, and into the world is born their beautiful
little boy.
They know it is a boy because of its dangling participle
