On trifling wit, and plays on words.
Not a little displeasing, also, is an assiduity in trifling which withdraws the mind from solid subject-matter out of which true beauty springs. Plays on words, puns and other playing around of that kind, unless they come to the judgement of the pen within the bounds of art, are not so much figures of speech as faults of style, and in those epigrams where the point rests solely in these there is nothing thinner, especially when they are so peculiar to one language that they cannot be translated into another. On this basis we have passed over such frivolous witticisms as Owen's:
Rope ends the robber, death is his last haul;
The gallows gets the gangster—if not all,
If many get away, God gives no hope:
It's an odd thief dies with no coffin rope.[29]
A little more humorous is that of another poet on the Swiss killed at night, though it too is faulty:
Annihilated in night snow by a nut stick,
I snow, night, nut, now, and annihilation know.[30]