words

One of my favorite things to glimpse is a good word origin. Most of the
time, it seems, it behooves us to be ignorant that words are symbols. A
high percentage of speech is actually made of phrases -- many of which even
have literal meanings in contemporary English -- whose meaning has become
atomic. This is a major contributor to the "e-mail bug"; the atomisizing
often depends on intonation.

Besides the e-mail bug, there are one or two other things known to get
people to notice the symbolic nature of words =8^)... One of them is when
words are new to a context. To the point:

[Paul Erlich]
>I don't mean to be obstinate, but it depends on what you mean by "fly". The
>decatonic scale, like the ordinary diatonic scale, depends on "puns"
>relative to JI.

Does anybody know who first used the word "pun" in this context? They
deserve a pat on the back.

-C.