Founded by the late John Crosbie in 1979, the International Save The Pun Foundation has become the world's largest and fastest-growing apocryphal society. Since one person in five in North America is a functional illiterate, and since everywhere the little red schoolhouse is full of too many little-read students, the Foundation exists to arouse a greater interest in reading by encouraging people to have fun with words.

In the pursuit of its fundamental goal to make reading fun, The International Save The Pun Foundation publishes a monthly newsletter, the pundit; organizes dinners for punsters; promotes and reviews books and tapes by paranomaniacs; organizes Punster-Of-The-Year awards; and generally enjoys itself.

The current chairman of the bored, Norman Gilbert, is a financial planner based in Toronto, Ontario. He first subscribed to the pundit in 1984, after hearing John Crosbie in a radio interview, and has never looked back. When John died in 1994, Norman acquired the rights to the Foundation from John's estate, the transaction taking place, appropriately, on April Fool's Day.

Under Norman's leadership, the Foundation's 1,600 members continue to stumble onward, spreading the good (and sometimes not-so-good) words, and scattering their gems of linguistic libertinism about them like Johnny Appleseed, although perhaps not always with the same level of appreciation. Hysterically screaming "Up the pun!", this unruly band of rebels may be found waving tattered copies of the pundit, and storming the barricades of grammatical rules and regulations around the world. From Australia to Zimbabwe, wherever they are erected by the steadily retreating phalanxes of pedants and self-appointed guardians of our language, the barriers are falling, and people are having fun with the language, thanks to the unceasing efforts of Norman and his plucky crew.

Commonly known as punning and plays on words, paronomasia is the humourous or fanciful use of the similarity between different words and/or the different senses of the same word. Sir Ernest Gowers, in Fowler's Modern English Usage, suggests that perhaps the best known pun is one that requires a basic knowledge of Greek to achieve its effect. Saint Matthew, in Chapter XVI, Verse 18, has Christ say, "Thou are Peter (Greek Petros) and upon this rock (Greek petra) I will build my church."

Puns are otherwise found at every turn, and in spite of our generally condescending view of this light-hearted form of speech, turn up with disconcerting (for some) frequency in the works of many of our most highly venerated authors, including Shakespeare. As Gowers puts it, "Puns are good, bad, and indifferent, and only those who lack the wit to make them are unaware of the fact."

If the forerunners and shock-troops were such greats as Shakespeare, Boswell and Calverley, then todays battalions are nonetheless nobly led by their lineal descendents, John Crosbie, Richard Lederer, and Norman Gilbert. Their product may sound to some unschooled ears like an illness - or perhaps a rhinoceros farting - but today's chevaliers de la bon mot are indeed fighting the good fight.