Notes & Queries Archive
QUERY1851

Pun

By A. R.

C. H. KENYON (Vol. iii., p. 37.) asks if Milton could have seriously perpetrated the pun "each tome a tomb." I doubt whether he intended it for a pun. But his Query induces me to put another. Whence and when did the aversion to, and contempt for, a pun arise? Is it an offshoot from the Reformation? Our Catholic fellow-countrymen surely felt no such aversion; for the claim which they make of supremacy for their church is based upon a pun, and that a very sorry one.

Topics: Puns, Reformation, Catholic Church