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“Wussies and pussies” – those are the only kinds of people who care about plagiarism, according to Bob Dylan. That was his response to an interviewer who asked him about some rather suspicious similarities between lyrics on his 2001 album Love and Theft (pun intended, perhaps?) and a Japanese true-crime book from the ’90s.
Doubt- What is pun intended here ? And why is the author asking it by writing perhaps ?
Article- https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/who-cares-about-plagiarism/
That is pretty obscure. What the writer is saying is that Dylan was accused of plagiarizing (i.e. stealing) some of his lyrics from a Japanese book. So, "Love and Theft" might perhaps be the title of an album where he steals lyrics from some book that he loves.
This isn't really a pun, because a pun is a joke where one set of words is substituted for another set that it sounds like. This doesn't happen here. Here's an example of a real pun:
So, actually, you're confused because this is actually a bad bit of writing. If I were the writer's editor, I would say to delete it and come up with something else. For example:
That was his response to an interviewer who asked him about some rather suspicious similarities between lyrics on his 2001 album Love and Theft (admission of guilt, perhaps?) and a Japanese true-crime book from the ’90s.
Edit: An improvement to my improvement comes to mind:
That was his response to an interviewer who asked him about some rather suspicious similarities between lyrics on his 2001 album Love and Theft (Freudian slip, perhaps?) and a Japanese true-crime book from the ’90s.
I think the reviewer is suggesting that Dylan used "theft" in the title because he had stolen some of the lyrics. "Perhaps" is used because it's speculation about what someone else meant, so the reviewer can't be certain.
When I make a pun, I can say "pun intended", but the nature of a pun is that it is deniable, so you can't say for certain whether someone else means to make a pun.
Having said that, I don't think this qualifies as a pun at all, as it isn't taking advantage of different meanings of a word.
