Wednesday, February 2, 2022

Writing and word play

Word of the Day
ox·y·mo·ron /ˌäksəˈmôrˌän / noun = a figure of speech that juxtaposes concepts with opposing meanings in a phrase that creates an apparent self-contradiction.

Let's play with words 

  1. A dangling participle walks into a bar.  Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
  2. A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
  3. An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
  4. Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
  5. A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
  6. Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
  7. A question mark walks into a bar?
  8. A non sequitur walks into a bar.  In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
  9. Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar.  The bartender says, "Get out — we don't serve your type."
  10. A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
  11. A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
  12. Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar.  They sit.  They converse.  They depart.
  13. A synonym strolls into a tavern.
  14. At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar — fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
  15. A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting.  With a cute little sentence fragment.
  16. Falling slowly, slowly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
  17. A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
  18. An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
  19. The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
  20. A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
  21. The past, present, and future walked into a bar.  It was tense.
  22. A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate.  The noun declines.
  23. An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
  24. A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
  25. A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
  26. A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.
Did you have as much fun reading that as I did?  Let me know if any of these tickled your funny bone.  And by the way, when you are writing, hyphens matter.