1170. This week, we look at "feghoots," the pun-based stories popularized by writers like Isaac Asimov, and why they are designed to make you roll your eyes. Then, we look at how your brain stores words and the lightning-fast way it retrieves them during a normal conversation.
1170. This week, we look at "feghoots," the pun-based stories popularized by writers like Isaac Asimov, and why they are designed to make you roll your eyes. Then, we look at how your brain stores words and the lightning-fast way it retrieves them during a normal conversation.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and today, we're going to talk about funny feghoots, those puns at the end of a story that make you groan out loud. Then we're going to talk about your mental dictionary — the lightning-fast way your brain retrieves words, and why yours isn't like anyone else's.
This first segment is by Karen Lunde.
by Karen Lunde
Most writers hope their readers take some sort of feeling away from their stories. Their goal is to make you laugh, or cry, or sigh, or ponder. But there's one type of story with a totally different agenda — to make you roll your eyes and groan.
These short narratives have a funny-sounding name: feghoots. A feghoot is a type of story or anecdote designed to end with a groan-worthy pun. In fact, the whole story is the setup for the pun.
Now, before I give you an example of a feghoot, let's talk a little about when and how they showed up as a form of story-based wordplay and why they're strongly linked to science fiction writing.
Story puns were almost certainly a thing before they got their weird name, but the term "feghoot" was born in 1956. Author Reginald Bretnor (writing as Grendel Briarton, an anagram for his real name) published a long-running series in "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction" called "Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot." And each story was an elaborate setup for a bad pun.
Feghoots are often described as a specific type of "shaggy dog story" — that's a rambling tale with a deliberately ridiculous or anticlimactic ending. Shaggy dog stories are the sort a four-year-old might tell, filled with tangential twists and turns and plenty of unnecessary details. The humor comes from the underwhelming or ridiculous finish. One example I found features a woman arguing with a ticket seller at a movie theater as she tries to get her super-intelligent, "almost human" dog into the theater with her. The ticket seller finally relents and lets them both in to see the movie. Then, when the woman and dog exit, he comments on how well-behaved the dog was and exclaims, "He even seemed to enjoy the movie!" The woman answers, "Oh, he did! But he liked the book much better."
So feghoots are like shaggy dog stories, except … instead of a weird or disappointing punchline, they end with a cringey pun. In Bretnor's original tales, these puns usually twisted well-known proverbs, titles, or catchphrases. The stories follow Ferdinand Feghoot, a time-traveling troubleshooter for the Society for the Aesthetic Re-Arrangement of History, as he navigates various misadventures — always wrapping up in just a few paragraphs with the requisite groaner.
I mentioned that this storytelling style has been popular in science fiction circles, and some sci-fi heavy hitters even got in on the fun. Isaac Asimov wrote a feghoot for the 1995 book "Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection."
In this story, Ferdinand Feghoot is observing the justice system on the planet Lockmania. In the courtroom, the judge fines a woman who screamed during a religious silence one silver dollar and a man who pushed someone who objected to the screaming a twenty-dollar gold piece. But when it comes time to sentence the violent rioters, the judge fines them just one silver dollar each. Feghoot questions the judge, who tells him he fined the woman and man according to the legal maxim: "Screech is silver, but violence is golden," a play on "speech is silver, but silence is golden." Feghoot can't argue with that, but then why did the violent rioters receive fines of just one silver dollar? "That's another legal maxim," says the judge. "Every crowd has a silver fining" (a play on "every cloud has a silver lining").
Asimov also wrote a feghoot about a time-traveling protagonist named Stein who commits a crime and attempts to evade prosecution by traveling into the future. The story ends with the judicial verdict: "A niche in time saves Stein," a pun on "a stitch in time saves nine."
Stephen King wrote a feghoot for the anthology "Bred Any Good Rooks Lately?: A Collection of Puns, Shaggy Dogs, Spoonerisms, Feghoots & Malappropriate Stories." The book's title comes from the last line of Stephen King's contribution, a humorous short story called "For the Birds." And Arthur C. Clarke's vignette "Neutron Tide" builds toward a pun involving space travel and star systems with the punchline "star-mangled spanner," a play on "Star-Spangled Banner." (And yes, these are like spoonerisms that we've talked about in the past.)
The feghoots phenomenon goes beyond literature, too! If you've watched classic cartoons, you might remember a couple of regular segments on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show called "Peabody's Improbable History" and "Aesop & Son."
In "Peabody's Improbable History," Mr. Peabody, a beagle who graduated from Harvard "wagna cum laude" at age three, is a canine genius. He and his adopted son, Sherman, travel through time in his invention, The WABAC [wayback] Machine. On their journeys, they meet historic figures and help them with their plights. In one episode where a skeleton loses its arm, Peabody quips, "Well, that's disarming." When the Greeks fail their attempted raid of Troy, Peabody explains, "They must troy, troy again."
And as an aside, in case you're wondering, yes, the WABAC Machine from "Peabody's Improbable History" was, indeed, the inspiration for the name of the Wayback Machine at archive.org that lets you look at old versions of web pages!
The other segment, "Aesop & Son," was known for its "reverse-engineered" puns that skewered traditional moral lessons. Each episode featured the ancient Greek fabulist Aesop telling a twisted version of a fable to his son, Junior, who would then deliver an atrocious pun as a "better" moral. A fun one I found is "People in grass houses shouldn't throw bones."
And lest you go thinking that feghoots are old school, they've absolutely appeared in more modern contexts! In The Simpsons' episode "Apocalypse Cow," Bart befriends a cow named Lou. At the end of the episode, the two part ways and Bart muses, "For once in my life, I had a cow, man," a direct play on his famous catchphrase, "Don't have a cow, man!"
And in an episode of the animated series "Teen Titans Go!" called "The Art of Ninjitsu," the team is trying to capture the "Golden McGuffin," an unknown object that is somehow important to Robin. When they find the object of their quest, the McGuffin turns out to be an egg, bacon, and English muffin sandwich. So, of course, the pun almost writes itself when Cyborg asks, "You mean we did all this for an Egg McGuffin?"
So, the next time you spot one of these punny stories in the wild, you'll have a fun new name to call them. And as always, it's been fun being in feghoots with you today!
That segment was written by Karen Lunde, a longtime writer and editor turned web designer and marketing mentor. Solo service business owners come to her for websites where beautiful design meets authentic words that actually build connections. Find her at chanterellemarketingstudio.com.
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This next piece is by Nichol Castro, an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo.
The days of having a dictionary on your bookshelf are numbered. But that’s OK, because everyone already walks around with a dictionary – not the one on your phone, but the one in your head.
Just like a physical dictionary, your mental dictionary contains information about words. This includes the letters, sounds and meaning, or semantics, of words, as well as information about parts of speech and how you can fit words together to form grammatical sentences. Your mental dictionary is also like a thesaurus. It can help you connect words and see how they might be similar in meaning, sound, or spelling.
As a researcher who studies word retrieval, or how you quickly and accurately pull words out of your memory to communicate, I’m intrigued by how words are organized in our mental dictionaries. Everyone’s mental dictionary is a little bit different. And I’m even more intrigued by how we can restore the content of our mental dictionaries or improve our use of them, particularly for those who have language disorders.
Language is part of what makes humans special, and I believe everyone deserves the chance to use their words with others.
While a physical dictionary is helpful for shared knowledge, your personal mental dictionary is customized based on your individual experiences. What words are in my mental dictionary might overlap with the mental dictionary of someone else who also speaks the same language, but there will also be a lot of differences between the content of our dictionaries.
You add words to your mental dictionary through your educational, occupational, cultural and other life experiences. This customization also means that the size of mental dictionaries is a little bit different from person to person and varies by age. Researchers found that the average 20-year-old American English speaker knows about 42,000 unique words, and this number grows to about 48,000 by age 60. And some people will have even larger vocabularies.
By now, you might be envisioning your mental dictionary as a book with pages of words in alphabetical order you can flip through as needed. While this visual analogy is helpful, there is a lot of debate about how mental dictionaries are organized. Many scholars agree that it’s probably not like an alphabetized book.
One widely rejected theory, the grandmother cell theory, suggests that each concept is encoded by a single neuron. This implies that you would have a neuron for every word that you know, including “grandmother.”
While not accepted as accurate, the aspect of the grandmother cell theory suggesting that certain parts of the brain are more important for some types of information than others is likely true. For example, the left temporal lobe on the side of your brain has many regions that are important for language processing, including word retrieval and production. Rather than a single neuron responsible for processing a concept, a model called parallel distributed processing proposes that large networks of neurons across the brain work together to bring about word knowledge when they fire together.
For example, when I say the word “dog,” there are lots of different aspects of the word that your brain is retrieving, even if unconsciously. You might be thinking about what a dog smells like after being out in the rain, what a dog sounds like when it barks, or what a dog feels like when you pet it. You might be thinking about a specific dog you grew up with, or you might have a variety of emotions about dogs based on your past experiences with them. All of these different features of “dog” are processed in slightly different parts of your brain.
One reason your mental dictionary can’t be like a physical dictionary is that it is dynamic and quickly accessed.
Your brain’s ability to retrieve a word is very fast. In one study, researchers mapped the time course of word retrieval among 24 college students by recording their brain activity while they named pictures. They found evidence that participants selected words within 200 milliseconds of seeing the image. After word selection, their brain continued to process information about that word, like what sounds are needed to say that chosen word and ignoring related words. This is why you can retrieve words with such speed in real-time conversations, often so quickly that you give little conscious attention to that process.
Until … you have a breakdown in word retrieval. One common failure in word retrieval is called the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. It’s the feeling when you know what word you want to use but are unable to find it in that moment. You might even know specific details about the word you want, like other words with similar meaning or maybe the first letter or sound of that word. With enough time, the word you wanted might pop into your mind.
These tip-of-the-tongue experiences are a normal part of human language experience throughout life, and they increase as you grow older. One proposed reason for this increase is that they’re due to an age-related disruption in the ability to turn on the right sounds needed to say the selected word.
For some people, though, tip-of-the-tongue experiences and other speech errors can be quite impairing. This is commonly seen in aphasia, a language disorder that often occurs after injury to the language centers of the brain, such as stroke, or neurodegeneration, such as dementia. People with aphasia often have difficulty retrieving words.
Fortunately, there are treatments available that can help someone improve their word retrieval abilities. For example, semantic feature analysis focuses on strengthening the semantic relationships between words. There are also treatments like phonomotor treatment that focus on strengthening the selection and production of speech sounds needed for word production. There are even apps that remotely provide word retrieval therapy on phones or computers.
So the next time you have a conversation with someone, take a moment to reflect on why you chose the specific words you did. Remember that the words you use and the mental dictionary you have are part of what make you and your voice unique.
That segment was written by Nichol Castro, an assistant professor of communicative disorders and sciences at the University at Buffalo. It originally appeared on The Conversation, and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
Finally, I have a familect from David.
Hi, Mignon. I'm David Hayes from Toronto in Canada. When I was a child, I often went with my parents on car trips. We might be visiting relatives or going for a walk outside the city or sometimes to a resort for a holiday. Periodically, my dad would pull over onto the shoulder of the highway and get out saying, "I'm just going to pick some lupins." I remember peering at my mother from the backseat and saying, "What are lupins?" She would explain that they're a kind of wildflower. "Why does Dad want to stop to get them?" "He thinks they're pretty, I guess," she'd say. I found this puzzling, especially since my father never came back with any. "Where are the lupins?" "I couldn't find any," he would say. A few years later, I learned that going to pick some lupins meant my father needed to take a pee in the bushes at the side of the road. So now, when I'm driving with one of my sisters or my spouse, I'll say, "I'm going to pick some lupins," even if I'm just stopping at a highway rest stop.
Thanks, David. It started to dawn on me about halfway through where this was going!
If you'd like to share your familect, the information should be in the description for this episode in your podcast player.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Maram Elnagheeb; Morgan Christianson; Rebekah Sebastian; Nat Hoopes; Holly Hutchings, and Dan Feierabend, who just celebrated his 8th wedding anniversary with his wife on March 10th (which he says is also Mario day)! Congratulations!
I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all. Thanks for listening.