Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The Three Wise Men arrive today, bearing puns. One Big Happy and Rhymes With Orange:

(#1)

(#2)

empire / umpire puns are not new — see Flanders and Swann’s “Tried by the Centre Court” (a song about a tennis umpire: “The umpire, on whom the sun never sets”) — but the combination with Holy Roman / Holy Roller is new to me. From Wikipedia:

“Holy Roller” is a term for some Christian churchgoers of the Holiness, and Pentecostal traditions. The term is sometimes used derisively by those outside these denominations, as if to describe people literally rolling on the floor in an uncontrolled manner. However, those within these Wesleyan traditions have reclaimed it as a badge of honor; for example William Branham wrote: “And what the world calls today holy-roller, that’s the way I worship Jesus Christ.”

And then there’s penny (the coin) / penne (the pasta).

This entry was posted on January 6, 2017 at 7:49 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Puns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.