Ruff work

A man appears to be carving the mouth of a large dog made of wood. A passerby comments, “What are you up to?” The carver replies, “I’m trying to make him speak.” The first guy says, “You can’t make a dog from wood bark.” What’s so funny about this? I just got a fresh new supply of puns and this is the first one that caught my eye and made me laugh. Of course, as I say “caught my eye” I realize this brings to mind fishing for eyeballs and if one of my eyes were ever literally hooked, I wouldn’t be too happy about it, But that expression belongs with the idioms in my other blog, Rolls off the Tongue. This joke has a couple of interesting things going for it. First of all is the double meaning of “bark” and “make”. Besides the lexical level, there’s grammar involved here too. “Bark” can be both a noun and a verb. It’s also a pure homonym – same word, same spelling, different meanings. As a noun, “bark” means the skin, or outer layer of a tree, so it’s related to wood. In fact, wood carvings often have some bark left on them. However, as a verb, “bark” refers to the sound that dogs make. In fact it can be a noun this way too. The noun is the sound itself and the verb is the act of making the sound. There’s the expression “His bark is worse than his bite,” and also people might say that “those dogs bark too much at night,” for example. As far as the word “make” goes, it can mean “to force”, or “to create”, depending on the context. In the case of the joke the guy is either trying to force a non-living dog, to bark, .or he’s carving the dog out of tree bark. Take your pick. And THAT’s what’s so funny! #joke #pun #ESL #ELT #ELL #ELD #ESOL #EFL #TESOL #TESL #Englishlanguage #English #language #learnenglish #twinglish #wordplay #wood #bark #dog