The Smoking Pun

This collection of 44 puns, each accompanied by a funny illustration, analyzes in endnotes the origins, roots, prefixes, suffixes, and linguistic peculiarities of certain punned words. Tricky twists turn phrases such as "religiously ambivalent" into "either-or-thodox," and illuminating notes explain how such phrases as "no stone unturned" mutated from the darker "no bones unburned," which refers to the digging up and destroying of the bones of people posthumously convicted of heresy. Readers are also invited to submit their own puns using mail-in forms at the back of the book.