I had an interesting conversation with some friends about puns. After riding a bike for the first time in a long time, my friend David said it was “good to be back in the saddle,” and he wondered whether this counted as a pun.<\/p>\n
Since a bicycle actually has a saddle (the more technical term for the seat), it could be argued that this is just a literal statement. On the other hand, “back in the saddle” also has a metaphoric meaning, so it could be argued that his statement has two simultaneous meanings, and therefore should indeed count as a pun.<\/p>\n
It then occurred to me that this is an example of a class of statement whose literal and metaphorical meanings coincide — a metaphor for itself. You might say it is “autophorical”.<\/p>\n
Here are some other autophorical statements. Perhaps you can think of more:<\/p>\n
“Sorry, the train derailment threw me off track.”<\/p>\n
“Hey, everybody on this cruise is in the same boat.”<\/p>\n
“Drosophila were dropping like flies.”<\/p>\n
“The entire soccer team is having a field day.”<\/p>\n
“I went out on a limb to rescue your cat from that tree.”<\/p>\n
“The editor cut my novel to five pages, to make a long story short.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had an interesting conversation with some friends about puns. After riding a bike for the first time in a long time, my friend David said it was “good to be back in the saddle,” and he wondered whether this counted as a pun. Since a bicycle actually has a saddle (the more technical term … Continue reading “Autophorical”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11291"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11312,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11291\/revisions\/11312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}