Punning on Anglicisms - a Manifestation of Linguistic Ingenuity
Nevena Alexieva
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 pun-dits”, whose author, M. Goerlach, 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” (Goerlach, 1994:52). But
while the German puns in his paper appear to represent the more serious, linguisticallycentred 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 facetioussounding, linguistic remarks on topical social phenomena.
Before I discuss a few typical examples of satirically-oriented witticisms, excerpted from
mass media sources, I would like to comment briefly on their linguistic foundation. Puns, as is
well known, rely for their effect on a perceived closeness of the forms or meanings of two
words. This paronymic relationship is exploited in individual speech acts, and the playful
coinages are not meant to last, being typical instances of nonce-words, or occasionalisms. But
the humorous formations based on anglicisms involve more than linguistic features proper they heavily rely not only on an awareness of their English origin on the part of Bulgarian
readers/viewers, but also on a mature, healthy reaction towards the excessive use of English
borrowings. Therefore, the overall effect, linguistic and cultural, of such punning amounts to
much more, which will be examined below. Here are a few characteristic examples that
illustrate two linguistic types:
Group A:
1. The fashionable anglicism folk (formed by clipping from folklor "folk music") has
deviated from the meaning of the full form and is used to designate "modern songs appealing
to the popular taste".(Their older, well-established name is chalga, based on a Turkish
borrowing. For many Bulgarian speakers it functions with a negative affective meaning:
"often vulgar and of mediocre quality". Thus comparing chalga with trendy folk, it seems
that the latter has come to life as an ameliorated expression, a word with a positive halo, a
"purr" word, the purpose of whose appearance is exactly to neutralize the effect of the older
"snarl" word by getting round the fact that this type of popular music is not generally noted
for high quality (the terms "purr" vs "snarl" are borrowed from Leech (1974:52-54)).
The above-mentioned meaning of folk is also expressed by the compound pop-folk, and it
is this form that has given rise to the pun potop-folk, whose first part means "flood". The pun
is thus intended as a facetious critical reference to the rather wide spread of this type of
music.
2. Another pun, based on the loanword kavarversija (E cover-version), is, however,
intentionally used outside the domain of music: this is the blend shikalkavarversija. It has
come to be used as the general heading of satirical poems which ridicule topical negative
social phenomena. The pun derives its effect from the partial closeness between the first
element kavar- and the Bulgarian verb shikalkavja "be insincere, beat about the bush". The
playful creation echoes yet another Bulgarian word: shikalki (literally "oak-apples"), which is
mostly used in a figurative expression meaning "be negligent, not serious enough".
3. The satirical page of a newspaper has adopted for its heading a playful modification of
the loan tabloid, namely tabloidiot, which is printed against a suitable yellow background.
The page offers all of its commentaries on topical events in this country and abroad within the
framework of a parody on amorous and criminal stories.
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4. Another pun exploiting the well-known internationalism idiot on the basis of casual
formal similarity is vidiot, which blends video and idiot. It is used as a part of the humorous
names of invented agencies represented as video distributors, thus: “Vidiot Bulgarian”, or
“World Vidiot International”. In addition to this, the English words proper in the two names
are accurately transcribed in Cyrillic letters, in this way contributing to the overall parodic
effect. The pun vidiot is also paronymically related to an actual word - the verb vidiotjavam
"make an idiot of". So linguistically, vidiot can also be seen as the result of fanciful
backformation.
5. The modern loan ekshan (from E action), meaning both "action film" and "fight", is
extremely popular, and, as is to be expected, is not neglected by humorists. It is used in the
purposefully facetious titles of parodic comic strips or film advertisements in combination
with other expressive colloquial words, for example: dupshan (from Bg dupe "buttocks" and
ekshan), kjuchekshan (from kjuchek "belly dance" and ekshan), kjutekshan (from kjutek
"fight", a humorous informal word, and again ekshan. Thus by fusing two actually
synonymous words - a familiar Turkish loan and a trendy anglicism - kjutekshan doubles the
effect of the pun.). These, and similar playful coinages, are meant to parody the excessive
exploitation by the media of what is seen as US-style erotic and criminal topics.
6. A popular TV show has parodied a well-known commercial for sophisticated domestic
appliances by resorting to a minor phonemic change in its name: thus “Teleshop” becomes
“Teleshok” (the loan shok representing E shock). Imitating the persuasive manner of the
commercial, the fake announcement advertised "a unique, all-purpose tool" - ... a pavingstone. It is demonstrated as a 'universal tool' - ranging from a hammer, through a can opener,
to a remote control - and unfailingly destroying the target object in the end. The underlying
intention of the parody, however, is not to ridicule advertising ways as such - it is rather
directed against the pervasive atmosphere of violence, both on a national and international
scale.
Group B:
1. The loanword lokaut (E lockout) has recently changed its status of an exoticism back
into one of topical designation of an actual, present-day economic action. This semantic
transition is exploited in the following joke, which results in wordplay: “What is a lokaut?” “The LOComotive (Bg LOKomotivni) drivers are on strike, and that’s why they are kept OUT
(Bg AUT).”
2. The next case of punning was inspired by the political scandal over US President
Clinton’s notorious amorous affair with M.L. The neologism impichmant (E impeachment)
experienced a brief surge of popularity and soon underwent a playful reinterpretation in
cartoons on the topic: imPICHmant, spelt like this, with its middle syllable in capitals,
accompanied as a caption a caricature of Clinton in which he was represented as a machoman. The point of the pun is that the fragment -pich- happens to coincide with the free form
pich, a very expressive slangy Bulgarian word (still considered taboo by older generations),
which means exactly "macho-man". And thanks to this pun the message of the caption
“ImPICHmant” amounted to the ironic comment: "accusing a macho-man of machismo".
3. Another pun, based on inter-linguistic lexical homonymy, involves the loan snek
(usually found as a bound form in snek-bar (E snack bar) and sneg - a common dialectal
form of the Bulgarian word snjag ("snow"). What is more, the loan and the native form are
virtually identical in pronunciation: final voiced consonants in Bulgarian are as a rule
unvoiced, so sneg is read as /snek/.
The pun is situated in the following general context: a humorous paper has a column
cleverly imitating the writing - both as style and attitude - of a junior pupil. The columnist
finds such a ‘naive’ form convenient for critical comments on a wide variety of topical
subjects, one of which is the powerful presence of English borrowings, especially when
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regarded as intrusions on the national culture. The above-mentioned pun appeared in the title
of an essay on the earliest winter snow ("Parvi snek"), in which the ‘junior author’
erroneously used the loan instead of the native word. Thus the pun is a simultaneous comment
on junior pupils’ unstable spelling (failing to differentiate between written and spoken
forms) and the psychological impact of anglicisms.
Linguistically, all the instances of wordplay presented here can be analysed as follows:
Puns based on anglicisms are just a special case of puns, which, by virtue of their newness,
belong to the general category of nonce-words, or occasionalisms. The playful creations under
discussion can be shown to share their basic characteristics (Lykov, 1977:62-83):
The puns have been purposefully created by linguistically ingenious minds as witty
‘nutshell’ comments on topical cultural features, both national and foreign. So, as linguistic
expressions, they are themselves meant to be short-lived, no matter how clever or interesting
they may appear.
Semantically, in order to fulfil their function of witty ‘nutshell’ comments, the puns are
heavily dependent on the context in which they were coined (cf Bortnichuk et al, 1988:175).
This is proved by the necessity to supply them with the above explanations.
The puns considered here are the result of individual improvisation, but it nevertheless
follows established rules. Thus a linguistic analysis of the appearance of Group A puns
reveals the powerful role of a language’s word-formation system even in such cases. All the
puns here exemplify the very productive modern word-formation process of blending,
whose “rather daring playfulness is popular” (Quirk et al, 1985:1583). It is represented with
different combinations of clipped and free forms, either as a blending of the same type, or of a
mixed type of forms:
Thus potop-folk, dupshan and Teleshok exemplify the fusion of splinters: pop + potop,
dupe + ekshan, shop + shok. Alternatively, potop and shok can be regarded as cases of
replacement of pop by potop, and of shop by shok, or even as one of absorption of potop
into po-p by insertion of the fragment -to-, and one of blending of shop and shok by
preserving the first identical fragment and replacing only the final phoneme. These cases
resemble the famous English blend foolosopher, playfully echoing philosopher.
The rest of the puns in Group A represent the mixed type of blending (a splinter + a free
form): shikalkavja + kavarversija, tabloid + idiot, video + idiot, kjuchek + ekshan, kjutek +
ekshan. Alternatively, the last two words can be analysed as a fusion of a free form + a
splinter (kjuchek/kjutek + ekshan). The latter approach makes it possible to bring together
dupshan, kjuchekshan and kjutekshan by identifying a common ‘formative’ element -shan. (A
similar treatment is offered for motel, boatel and lorrytel in relation to the source word they
are modelled on, namely hotel, with the common element identified successively as -otel, -el,
or -tel (Pencheva, 1980:216).) In addition, the examples of the mixed type illustrate
telescopic overlapping of the combining forms, which enhances the punning effect
(shikalkavarversija, tabloidiot, vidiot, kjuchekshan, kjutekshan).
The puns in Group B, especially lokaut and imPICHmant, differ from those in Group A
by involving reinterpretation of fragments of the loans along the lines of folk etymology, or
homonymy. A comparison between the two anglicisms and their respective English sourcewords will help to clarify an important difference in the structural and semantic
interpretation of borrowings and native words.
Thus the loan lokaut is a simplex, which means that, unlike the original English lockout
(derived by conversion from the phrasal verb lock out), it is morphologically unmotivated for
Bulgarian users. Although there is also the sports loan term tajmaut (E time-out), and aut (E
out) is even found by itself, both as a sports term and a well-known colloquialism, lokaut and
tajmaut remain opaque. The fragment -aut is prevented from being recognized as a
formative element, because the loans function in unrelated terminological domains.
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Moreover, the initial segment lok- is not meaningful by itself, while tajm- , though generally
familiar, does not combine into a meaningful compound with -aut for Bulgarian speakers.
In this respect, the two anglicisms are a typical illustration of the general effect of lexical
borrowing - loss of motivation, i.e. of structural and semantic transparency of the loans in
comparison with their prototypes in the source-language (Hope,1971:611).
On the other hand, the very fact that the first fragment of lokaut is semantically
unburdened in Bulgarian may evoke new associations, which would be blocked in English by
the meaningfulness of the root morpheme lock-. So, what regularly accompanies lexical
borrowing is at least a partial reinterpretation of the source-word. It may be playful (as in the
case of lok-, seen as a splinter of lokomotivni), or serious (as, for example, in falstart (E
false start), interpreted by informants as a combination of fal (from E foul) and start).
So, the pun on lokaut can be seen as an outcome of the transformation of an original
English derivative into a morphologically simple loanword, which is then fancifully
reanalysed into a kind of blend. ImPICHmant represents a similar case of wordplay - the
English suffixal noun impeachment has produced a loan simplex, which has again been
playfully analysed into a ‘blend’, as by absorption of the Bulgarian root pich- into a
meaningless environment. What really happens is the reinterpretation of the initially
meaningless segment -pich- (E -peach-) as an actual Bulgarian word on the basis of interlinguistic homonymy.
Punning on the strength of homonymy, which involves whole words from two languages,
was discussed on the example of the borrowing snek (E snack), and the Bulgarian dialectal
form sneg ("snow").However, this time the relationship is reversed - the original intention is
to spell the Bulgarian word for "snow", but the ‘junior writer’ unwittingly ends up with the
loan.
To summarize:
All instances of wordplay considered in this paper (except sneg/snek) have been found to
display a fundamental feature of occasionalisms in general, and of puns on loans in particular,
namely a violation of established morpheme boundaries (Lykov, ibid:83; cf also with the
famous playful reinterpretation of the island name of Bikini as bi-kini, which has led to monokini (Pencheva, ibid:216)).
It seems that the expressiveness of the puns of both groups derives from the unexpected
and unpredictable blending of clippings and free forms, especially in combination with
reinterpretation.This basic quality of punning is well captured in Goerlach’s phrase: “the
mixing (of languages - N.A.)... exhibits elaborate language engineering” (ibid:50).
The linguistic facts presented in this paper show that even ephemeral speech products, like
puns based on anglicisms, have their roots in the language system, and, hence are much more
than just whimsical individual formations. On the other hand, as a cultural fact, such puns
bear witness not only to their authors’ linguistic ingenuity, but also to the intellectuals’ ability
to express a whole range of critical attitudes to contemporary social practices even in the
form of slight, short-lived creations.
Note: The abbreviations E and Bg accompanying examples in brackets stand for ‘English’ and
‘Bulgarian’.
Works cited
Bortnichuk et al 1988: E. H. Б о р т н и ч у к, И. В. В а с и л е н к о, Л. П. П а с т у ш е нк о. Словообразование в современном английском языке (Word-formation in modern
English). Вища школа, Киев (Vishcha shkola, Kiev), 1988.
Goerlach 1994: M. G o e r l a c h. Continental pun-dits. - English Today, 37, vol. 10, No.1,
Cambridge University Press, 1994, 50-52.
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Hope 1971: T. H o p e. Lexical Borrowing in the Romance Languages. Oxford, Blackwell,
1971.
Lykov 1977: А. Г. Л ы к о в. Окказионализм и языковая норма. Грамматика и норма.
(Occasionalism and language norm, Grammar and norm). Наука, Москва (Moscow,
Naouka), 1977.
Pencheva 1980: M. P e n c h e v a. The importance of one ‘minor’ process of wordformation. - English Studies, vol. 1. Sofia, Sofia University Press, 1980, 211-223.
Quirk et al 1985: R. Q u i r k, S. G r e e n b a u m, G. L e e c h, J. S v a r t v i k. A
comprehensive grammar of the English language. Longman, London & New York, 1985.