puns – Dan Q

Monday Punday

Have you come across Monday Punday? I only discovered it last year, sadly, after it had been on hiatus for like 4 years, following a near decade-long run, but I figured that if you like wordplay and webcomics as much as I do (e.g. if you enjoyed my Movie Title Mash-Ups, back in the day), then perhaps you’ll dig it too.

I’ve been gradually making my way through the back catalogue, guessing the answers (there’s a form that’ll tell you if you’re right!). I’ve successfully guessed almost half of all of them, now, and it’s been a great journey. It sort-of fills the void that I’d hoped Crimson Herring was going to before it vanished so suddenly.

So if you’re looking for a fresh, probably-finished webcomic that’ll sometimes make you laugh, sometimes make you groan, and often make you think, start by skimming the rules of Monday Punday and then begin the long journey through the ~500 published episodes. You’re welcome!

Bumblebees surprise scientists with ‘sophisticated’ social learning

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

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First, bees had to push a blue lever that was blocking a red lever… too complex for a bee to solve on its own. So scientists trained some bees by offering separate rewards for the first and second steps.

These trained bees were then paired with bees who had never seen the puzzle, and the reward for the first step was removed.

Some of the untrained bees were able to learn both steps of the puzzle by watching the trained bees, without ever receiving a reward for the first step.

…

Ian Aikman (BBC News)

This news story is great for two reasons.

Firstly, it’s a really interesting experimental result. Just when you think humankind’s learned everything they ever will about the humble bumblebee (humblebee?), there’s something more to discover.

That a bee can be trained to solve a complex puzzle by teaching it to solve each step independently and then later combining the steps isn’t surprising. But that these trained bees can pass on their knowledge to their peers (bee-ers?); who can then, one assumes, pass it on to yet other bees. Social learning.

Which, logically, means that a bee that learns to solve the two-lever puzzle second-hand would have a chance of solving an even more-complex three-lever puzzle; assuming such a thing is within the limits of the species’ problem-solving competence (I don’t know for sure whether they can do this, but I’m a firm bee-lever).

But the second reason I love this story is that it’s a great metaphor in itself for scientific progress. The two-lever problem is, to an untrained bee, unsolvable. But if it gets a low-effort boost (a free-bee, as it were) by learning from those that came before it, it can make a new discovery.

(I suppose the secret third reason the news story had me buzzing was that I appreciated the opportunities for puns that it presented. But you already knew that I larva pun, right?)

Solitary Nouns

The other night, Ruth and I were talking about collective nouns (y’know, like a herd of cows or a flock of sheep) and came up with the somewhat batty idea of solitary nouns. Like collective nouns, but for a singular subject (one cow, sheep, or whatever).

Then, we tried to derive what the words could be. Some of the results write themselves.¹

Captioned photos showing "a HERD of COWS" and "a HER of COW". — Mooving right on…

Captioned photos showing "a PRIDE of LIONS" and "a PROUD of LION". — I’d be lion if I said I wasn’t proud of this one.

Captioned photos showing "a COLONY of BEES" and "a COLONIST of BEE". — I’m pollen out all the collective nouns now!

Some of them involve removing one or more letters from the collective noun to invent a shorter word to be the solitary noun.

Captioned photos showing "an ARMY of ANTS" and "an ARM of ANT". The latter picture shows an ant lifting a stick many times its size. — They stay healthy by working out and getting vaccinated, both of which give them tough anty bodies.

Captioned photos showing "a COVEN of WITCHES" and "an OVEN of WITCH" (the latter picture shows a scene from Handsel & Gretel in which the witch is pushed into the oven). — The sound of an oven is a cackling: *“When shall I one meet again?”*

Captioned photos showing "a MURMURATION of STARLINGS" and "a MURMUR of STARLING". — Eventually it grows up into a star, which are a lot louder.²

For others, we really had to stretch the concept by mutating words in ways that “felt right”, using phoenetic spellings, or even inventing collective nouns so that we could singularise them:

Captioned photos showing "a GAGGLE of GEESE" and "a GIGGLE of GOOSE". — For more goose-related wordplay, take a gander at this blog post from a few years back.

Captioned photos showing "a ROUND of DRINKS" and "a ROW of DRINK": the latter photo shows a man drinking in a bar while fighting another man. — Getting smashed doesn’t *have* to end with bumps and boozers.³

Captioned photos showing "an 1812 of CANNONS" and "a 1 of CANNON". — Blast but not least.

Did I miss any obvious ones?

Footnotes

¹ Also consider “parliament of owls” ➔ “politician of owl”, “troop of monkeys” ➔ “soldier of monkey”, “band of gorillas” ➔ “musician of gorilla”. Hey… is that where that band‘s name come from?

² Is “cluster of stars” ➔ “luster of star” anything?

³ Ruth enjoyed the singularised “a low of old bollock”, too.