Crossword-Solution: PUNNING 7 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 10

Standard examples include: Data General => Dirty Genitals IBM 360 => IBM Three-Sickly Government Property --- Do Not Duplicate (on keys) => Government Duplicity --- Do Not Propagate for historical reasons => for hysterical raisins Margaret Jacks Hall (the CS building at Stanford) => Marginal Hacks Hall This is not really similar to the Cockney rhyming slang it has been compared to in the past, because Cockney substitutions are opaque whereas hacker punning jargon is intentionally transparent.

And can any one of those many things which are called by particular names be said to be this rather than not to be this? He replied: They are like the punning riddles which are asked at feasts or the children's puzzle about the eunuch aiming at the bat, with what he hit him, as they say in the puzzle, and upon what the bat was sitting.

There was no idle punning, and very little winking on the part of that lively young gentleman who, as the reader may remember, occasionally interposed some playful question or remark, which could hardly be considered relevant,—except when the least allusion was made to matrimony, when he would look at the landlady’s daughter, and wink with both sides of his face, until she would ask what he was pokin’ his fun at her for, and if he wasn’t ashamed of himself.

Nothing can be more captious or unfair, for instance, than the method by which Aristotle criticised the ideal state of Plato in his ethical works, and the passages quoted by Polybius from Timæus show that the latter historian fully deserved the punning name given to him.

Where words are not fitted with a single hard definition, rigidly observed, all repetition is a kind of delicate punning, bringing slight differences of application into clear relief.