A Commonplace Book

My first reaction to programmer punning had been a certain curiosity. The reason for compulsive punning among computer people seemed interesting, ripe for study.... [P]rogrammers had to work in the relentlessly literal language of code, where one slip of a letter reduced everything to incomprehensibility.... [The compiler] demands a degree of exactness that is exhausting, painful for an intelligent human being.... Puns, I would say, represented a human being's pent-up need for ambiguity. That a word could signify two things at once! And these double meanings could be simultaneously understood! What a relief from the flat-line understanding of a programmer's conversation with the machine!

But...I began to see something more sinister in the programmers' penchant for puns. It wasn't an upwelling of humanistic impulses in the face of the mute machine; it wasn't a cry for the sweet confusion of being human. Quite the contrary, it was an act of disdain for the complicated interchange known as conversation: for its vagaries, lost and meandering trails, half-understandings, and mysterious clarities. For the meaning of a pun is clear, all too clear. It demands a leap in understanding, to the exact place the punner demands. It's the programming of a conversation. Like the GOTO instruction in code, it says, Go here, jump to this place, unconditionally.... To take a word at the level of sound, to feel absolutely free (and delighted!) to take that word anywhere language suggested, never mind the intention of the person talking to you -- there is something fundamentally hostile in a pun.