Grammar Girl here. I'm in Jan Fogarty, and today we're going to talk about funny

fagghoots, those puns at the end of a story that make you groan out loud. Then we're going to

talk about your mental dictionary, the lightning fast way your brain retrieves words, and why yours

isn't like anyone else's. This first segment is by Karen Lundy. Most writers hope their readers

take some sort of feeling away from their stories. Their goal is to make you laugh or cry or sigh

or ponder. But there's one type of story with a totally

different agenda, to make you roll your eyes and groan. These short narratives have a funny

sounding name, Feghuts. A Feghut is a type of story or anecdote designed to end with a groan-worthy pun.

In fact, the whole story is the setup for the pun.

Now, before I give you an example of a fag-hout, let's talk about when and how they showed up as a form of story-based wordplay

and why they're strongly linked to science fiction writing.

Story pens were almost certainly a thing before they got their weird name, but the term

Feghout was born in 1956. Author Reginald Brett Nore, known as Grendel Brierton, an anagram for his real name, published a long-running

series in the magazine of fantasy and science fiction called Through Time and Space with Ferdinand

Feghout. And each story was an elaborate setup for a bad pun. Feghuts are often described as a

specific type of shaggy dog story.

That's a rambling tale with a deliberately ridiculous or anticlimactic ending. Shaky dog stories

are the sort of four-year-old might tell, filled with tangential twists and turns and plenty

of unnecessary details.

The humor comes from the underwhelming or ridiculous finish.

One example I found features a woman arguing with a ticket seller at a movie theater

as she tries to get her super intelligent, almost human dog into the theater with her.

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