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A linguistic excursion not related to the substance of this controversy: I'm looking for a term for "jokes or puns where the morphemes between which a clever r
by schoen 9y ago
A linguistic excursion not related to the substance of this controversy:
I'm looking for a term for "jokes or puns where the morphemes between which a clever relationship is drawn are actually true cognates, but the connection is no longer apparent to native speakers". Here that's true because English ad < advertisement < Middle French advertissement < advertir < Latin advertere 'turn towards, notice' is the same ad in "ad nauseam" 'to the point of nausea', both meaning 'toward' in Latin.
Does this kind of situation have a well-established name? (There might be subcategories for the case where the cognate preserves a connection in the meaning that's part of the joke, and the case where it's just coincidental, like here.)
- contravariant 9y agoEven if you reuse the same word it's still a pun. I don't think there's a different name for puns on homophones, cognates, or homonyms.