An Album Cover = Anal Bum Cover. Catch These Men = Catch The Semen. Pen Island = Penisland.
Back when I was a kid I sometimes had to do (obviously kid-friendly) puzzles like this in the puzzle books Mom got me. One I remember was trying to find the animal word hidden in a sentence. As in, “On this hill I once sneezed” (lion).
I don’t know, but I came up with one a couple years ago…
Stool Softener=Stools Oftener
In cryptic crosswords, that would be called a “charade”.
Until a few years ago, I was not aware that cryptic crosswords were a thing outside of Games magazine. One of the more shameful gaps in my knowledge.
In Linguistics, changing lexeme boundaries like that is called reanalysis, so I suppose a humorous reanalysis would be a misanalysis.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reanalysis
(Since reanalysis is also called ‘folk etymology’, this might be a ‘joke etymology’, but that’s taking a joke too far, folks.)
They are arguably spoonerisms, though spoonerisms are supposed to be “accidentally humorous”. There is/was a guy traveling the renaissance faires who tells spoonerisms for a living. Zilch, the Tory Speller. He’s great fun to listen to.
Not by any usual definition of spoonerisms, which require parts of words to be switched in order. In the examples, all of the parts of the words are in order.
This one seems to be well-known: Therapist = The rapist.
Also: Psychotherapist = Psycho the Rapist
You are correct. That’s what I get for trying to hold two conversations and pay attention to my screen. The screen lost. Sorry.
These are a standard part of the jokes on the Celebrity Jeopardy! sketches on Saturday Night Live:
I’ll take s-words for $200, Alex.
I’ve always been amused in department stores by the trilogy of menswear, womenswear and childrenswear.
I’ll be darned. I thought I wrote that joke!
TVTropes has the concept, but doesn’t mention a specific term for it. (It mentions scripta continua, but I don’t think it fits.)
Yeah, scripta continua just means writing “continuously”, with no markings or spaces to indicate word boundaries.
I only noticed because of a typo I made in a patient’s chart once.
There was a website at one point where you could get expert advice on various topics, called “expertsexchange.com” I believe they eventually added a dash in the middle to avoid the ambiguity.
I enjoyed Derleth’s info on reanalysis. That said, I think I prefer to imagine that cheeseburgers come from the city of Cheeseburg, whose demographics largely resemble Hamburg, except for a lower rate of lactose intolerance.
Another example similar to “hamburger” is “alcoholic”.
Alcohol-ic is reanalysed to al-coholic as in chocoholic, workaholic, etc.
The penis, mightier than the s-word.