_neigh_bour; but that can serve only in one limited use of the word,
and is no solution.

[Sidenote: Punnage.]

In talking with friends the common plea that I have heard for
homophones is their usefulness to the punster. 'Why! would you have
no puns?' I will not answer that question; but there is no fear of
our being insufficiently catered for; whatever accidental benefit
be derivable from homophones, we shall always command it fully and
in excess; look again at the portentous list of them! And since the
essential jocularity of a pun (at least when it makes me laugh) lies
in a humorous incongruity, its farcical gaiety may be heightened by
a queer pronunciation. I cannot pretend to judge a sophisticated
taste; but, to give an example, if, as I should urge, the _o_ of the
word _petrol_ should be preserved, as it is now universally spoken,
not having yet degraded into _petr'l_, a future squire will not be
disqualified from airing his wit to his visitors by saying, as he
points to his old stables, 'that is where I store my petrel', and when
the joke had been illustrated in _Punch_, its folly would sufficiently
distract the patients in a dentist's waiting-room for years to come,
in spite of gentlemen and chauffeurs continuing to say _petrol_, as
they do now; nor would the two _petr'ls_ be more dissimilar than the
two _mys_.

[Sidenote: Play on words.]

Puns must of course be distinguished from such a play on words as John
of Gaunt makes with his own name in Shakespeare's _King Richard II_.