No pun intended?
On Twitter earlier today, I accidentally thought of a pun but decided not to post it for two reasons. The context:
Tweet asking if you could, would go back to high school?
My reply: That would be a hard pass.
Then my mind, always thinking of plays on words and stupid jokes, thought of pass as in to pass a class. So I would definitely pass on being a high school student again, and it’d be hard to pass my classes.
Really bad pun. So I started to type “No pun intended.” But then I found myself in the same quandary I’m often in.
If I notice a pun before I hit send, isn’t the pun intended? I not only purposely sent the message with the pun, I took the time to point out the pun. If so, isn’t “No pun intended” like the half-truths politicians try to pull on us all the time? Like Bill Clinton saying “It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is”? (Except without the impending threat of impeachment looming over me.)
Should I add “I didn’t mean that as a pun!”, or “pun unintended” or “pun (somewhat) unintended”, or something similar to the tweet to try to explain that when I originally wrote it, I wasn’t trying to make a pun, but I did notice it before I tweeted it?
Should I not mention the pun at first, but comment on the pun afterwards say, “Excuse the pun!” or “Hey, that’s a pun!” etc. Which then falsely makes it seem like I unwittingly included the pun and only realized after the fact at the end of the tweet or in a separate tweet.
Should I do something else: for example, maybe not mention the pun at all, and see if people pick up on the pun? But does that put the reader in the gut-wrenching position of deciding whether or not to ask me if the pun was intended, or point out they noticed the pun with the risk that I or others would say, “duh of course it is”, etc.?
In this case, I thought it wasn’t a good enough pun to be worth this mental anguish, so I decided not to tweet a reply and moved on with my day. Albeit not completely moved on if I’m still thinking or writing about it. But what about the next time this moral dilemma arises?
What say ye? Here’s a Twitter poll I’ve started on the subject.
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