Punning on Anglicisms - a Manifestation of Linguistic Ingenuity
Punning on Anglicisms - a Manifestation of Linguistic Ingenuity

Summary/Abstract: The considerable lexical impact of English on Bulgarian, especially over the past decade of radical social and political changes, has manifested itself not only in an ever growing number of anglicisms, but also in an amusing linguistic exercise on the part of intellectuals of a humorous cast of mind. That this is not an isolated national phenomenon becomes clear from a paper entitled “Continental pundits”, whose author, M. Gorlach, describes a few cases of recent puns on anglicisms in German. In a footnote he remarks, “There must be plenty of evidence for similar uses of English words in other languages” (Gorlach, 1994:52). But while the German puns in his paper appear to represent the more serious, linguistically centred type of wordplay, which is partly rooted in the greater closeness of English and German, my selection contains exclusively puns that can be defined as witty, even facetious-sounding, linguistic remarks on topical social phenomena.

• Details
• Contents