Bringing The World Home To You

© 2024 WUNC North Carolina Public Radio
120 Friday Center Dr
Chapel Hill, NC 27517
919.445.9150 | 800.962.9862
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Ways To Avoid Punsplaining

Vince Rozmiarek

Hold your groans! Wordplay can be inventive, poignant and, at its finest, a shared discovery.

Some of the finest examples are portmanteaus: word mashups that create new meaning. An example — hetlagged (adj.) exhaustion from heteronormative media or social interactions. The Great Durham Pun Championship celebrates this brand of linguistic improvisation that serves as a springboard for conversation rather than a self-serving dead-end.

Host Frank Stasio explores the continued importance of creative wordsmithing with last year’s champion, Matt Morain, and with the competition’s judge, George Gopen, a professor emeritus of the practice of rhetoric at Duke University. The sold-out 2020 Great Durham Pun Championship will take place Tuesday, Feb. 4 at 7:30 p.m. at Motorco Music Hall and will benefit the Durham Literacy Center.
 

Grant Holub-Moorman coordinates events and North Carolina outreach for WUNC, including a monthly trivia night. He is a founding member of Embodied and a former producer for The State of Things.
Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.