Daily photo no. 9: Puns

One of my favourite things about English is the ease with which puns can be made, and one of my favourite things about Britain is its peoples' willingness to make the most dreadful puns in any situation. I have heard a pun during a funeral eulogy, and reader, I laughed. Paronomasia forms the basis of most of Radio Four's outfit too, so we should take a moment to remember Tim Brooke-Taylor, a master of the art who died a couple of days ago.



And where would Irish literature be without James Joyce's use of punning? 'After all, the Holy Roman Catholic Apostolic Church was built on a pun', he told a friend, referring to Jesus's classic gag of calling Peter (petros) his 'rock'.  So replete with puns are Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that his patron Harriet Weaver – who published him in the Egoist referred to them as 'your Wholesale Pun Factory' (it's obviously catching: her money came from the cotton industry and her name is prime example of nominative determinism). Puns come easily to colonised people – when an imposed language is sufficiently strange, subaltern cultures play around with its possibilities to subversive effect.

Puns are wonderful - they prove that structuralism is right and make you groan at the same time (just like my lecture on that subject). There is, of course, a long academic tradition of studying puns: Eleanor Cook's paper on punning in Wallace Steven and Elizabeth Bishop's poetry provoked a long-running discussion, for example.

Shop name puns are an art form, whatever you may have heard. I snap them whenever I can. My favourite (though I sadly don't have a picture) is in the Staffordshire town of Stone, where a canalside cottage has been turned into a hairdresser's shop. It is called, of course, Lock Keepers. If they cut hair as well as they pun, they deserve your custom once this is all over.

Anyway, this is a bike shop in Oxford. It's a tiny bit tortured but all the best puns are and it works.