Happy Monday Punday! Today's pun: Colonel and Private Kernels!

Did you know that word "colonel" is pronounced exactly the same as "kernel"?

/kɜrnl/

Why? Here's a little history:

"Colonel came into English, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, in the mid-16th century from Middle French, and there were two forms of the word then, coronel (or coronelle, akin to Spanish coronel) and colonel, the latter form more clearly reflecting its Old Italian antecedent, colonello ("column of soldiers," from Latin, columnella, "small column"). The written style continued to reflect the older form, while the spoken form, competing against it, as it were, reflected the other—coronel—which was often pronounced to sound like "kernul" or "kernel." Given the Middle French form, the r sound in the pronunciation of some Americans is not strange."

Check out the rest of the page this excerpt was taken from for a little more "colonel" word history: