Puns And Patronymics

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Title:     Puns And Patronymics
Author: William Davenport Adams [More Titles by Adams]

Probably there are few things more common, and at the same time more opposed to good taste, than punning upon people's names. Possibly the impertinence of it has some attraction; for, of course, all such 'witticisms' are impertinent--unless, indeed, a man puns on his own name, or, if he puns upon another's, takes care to make the observation complimentary. No doubt, neither Mrs. Cuffe nor Mrs. Tighe was very offended when Sydney Smith described one as 'the cuff that every one would wear,' and the other as 'the tie that no one would loose.' These are word-plays of the innocuous sort. Would that all such jests were equally inoffensive!

However, it is of little use to complain of a 'stream of tendency' which cannot be diverted from its course. The most distinguished people have had to tolerate the liberties taken with their names. Even the first of men has had to suffer, Hood having long ago said what a pity it was that, when Eve offered him the apple, poor Adam was not adam-ant. And when one turns to the celebrities of one's own country, one finds that many of them have had to endure attentions of the kind. There was, for example, that distinguished Marquis of whom it was said on one occasion that 'The nation's asleep, and the minister Rockingham.' There was also that Mr. Ward, afterwards Lord Dudley, of whom Byron declared that he would return to the Whigs if they would re-Ward him. How hard, again, was Punch upon Sir Francis Head, for his well-known apologia for Louis Napoleon:

'He wrote to the Times
In defence of the crimes
Disgraceful to the heart and to the Head, Head, Head.'

Hood pretended that, when he heard 'Those Evening Bells,' they did but remind him of the statesman who had invented and established the income-tax:

'Recalling only how a Peel
Has taxed the comings-in of Time!'

That Mr. Disraeli's popular diminutive should suggest punning was inevitable, and so we find Shirley Brooks proposing, in 1865, that,

'Having finished his Iliad and ceased to be busy,
Lord Derby should try and translate his Odd-Dizzy.'

The annals of the Church are no more free from jingles on names than those of any other institution. Familiar to many is the laconic epitaph on Archbishop Potter:

'Alack and well-a-day:
Potter himself is turned to clay!'

Horace Walpole wrote bitterly of Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury, that 'His grace signed his own proper name--Thomas Cant.,' which would certainly have read better as 'Thomas Cantuar.' But the bishops' signatures have always been regarded as fair game. What puns have been made on the unhappy, because so obvious, 'Oxon!' In 1848, when Bishop Hampden was accused of heresy by the party headed by the Bishop of Oxford, the would-be satirist wrote that

'As once the Pope with fury full,
When Luther laid his heavy knocks on,
At the Reformer loosed a Bull--
So these at Hampden set an Ox-on.'

Again, when Archdeacon Hale figured prominently in the old churchyard controversy, Punch observed:

'The intramural churchyard's reeking pale
Breathes health around it, says a reverend party;
But though the spot may keep a parson Hale,
Can people who in-hale its fumes be hearty?'

Turning to the records of the other professions, one finds a good deal of the same sort of thing. Literature affords such examples as those which are supplied in the well-known lines by John Henley on William Broome and by Lord Byron on Tom Moore ('Now 'tis Moore that's Little'). There were journal writers before Greville and Carlyle, and, when Lady Bury published her 'Diary of the Times of George IV.,' Hood, no doubt, was justified in crying, as he did:

'Oh, may I die without a Diary,
And be interred without a Bury-ing!'

In a very different spirit were James Smith's lines on Miss Edgeworth's works:

'Good and bad join in telling the source of their birth;
The bad own their edge, and the good own their worth.'

The vocal and histrionic arts have often had their victims. Who can possibly have forgotten Luttrell's famous compliment to Miss Tree:

'On this Tree when a nightingale settles and sings,
The Tree will return her as good as she brings.'

Here, if ever, was a pun on a name defensible. Less well known is this quatrain on the famous actor, William Farren, who died in 1861:

'If Farren, cleverest of men,
Should go to right-about,
What part of town will he be then?
Why, "Farren-done-Without"!'

Those ladies of beauty and fashion whose names were susceptible at once of pun and compliment have naturally inspired the wits of their respective days. Thus, it was said of the charming sisters Gunning, that Cupid, perceiving that the beaux of the time were proof against his darts, had now laid down his bow and conquered by 'gunning.' But perhaps the best thing of the sort ever composed was Lord Lyttelton's tribute to Lady Brown:

'When I was young and debonair,
The brownest nymph to me was fair;
But now I'm old and wiser grown,
The fairest nymph to me is Brown.'

Other celebrities could be named who came off badly in their encounter with the punsters. But, indeed, the list of such jests might be indefinitely extended, for the habit of making puns on patronymics has always been very widely spread, and has found many a sympathetic historian.

[The end]
William Davenport Adams's essay: Puns And Patronymics

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