Maybe it’s a Deliberate Pun

First panel. What are the hens doing? Laying or lying?

The hen says “lay.” But is she referring to laying eggs or being passive and lying in their nests? Maybe the author is wrong; maybe he’s presenting the hen as somewhat illiterate.

Don’t you be illiterate!

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The word is “located.”

For example:

Some of the best shopping in Idaho isn’t found at big, chain stores. Rather, it is found in the small, local shops that seem to be a bit out of the way. That is certainly the case with The Gathering Place, a small Amish Store located in Bonners Ferry in northern Idaho.

Here it is again in the next paragraph:

The Gathering Place is actually a combination of three separate stores: The Bread Basket, Sharon’s Country Store, and the 3-Mile Produce Stand. These stores are all run by the same owners and located under one roof.

https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/idaho/the-gathering-place-amish-store-id

Delete the words in bold. Does the meaning of the sentence change? If not, delete them.

You can use the word as a transitive verb: “See whether you can locate Bonners Ferry on a map.”

Here’s a picture of the place. Might be worth the trip.

If you can locate Bonners Ferry on a map…

On occasion we say (write) something like “go part way up the street” and it feels perfectly natural. We might also say something like “that’s only a part-way solution,” and that’s still okay. Now look at this sentence:

“There” in this case is Mars, specifically partway up the flank of Aeolis Mons, aka Mt. Sharp, the massive central peak in Gale Crater, where NASA’s Curiosity rover is still poking around.

https://badastronomy.substack.com/p/ban-378-giving-thanks-a-most-curious

This is a rather common change in English. We go from separate words, to hyphenated, to one word. (One of my favorite examples of this is the change from to-day to today.)

Anyway, this tendency to move toward single words is fairly common.

Here’s the picture that the sentence is about:

PS—Here’s a word that has finished the transition to one word, and the writer gets it wrong.

Maybe he split “shortcoming” to make a nicer line break; but then, he should have hyphenated it.

“Comprise” means something like “is composed of” and a lot of people, wanting to sound high class, get it wrong. Here’s how to use “comprise”:

By at least 55,000 years ago, the first Australians had navigated open seas in boats to reach the super-continent of Sahul, or Greater Australia (comprising Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania, which were one land mass when sea levels were lower). 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03497-0

The whole thing comprises its parts. Got it?

The sentence is from a book review. The book is Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs Pat Shipman Belknap (2021) and here’s a picture from the review:

I made some of the words bold to make them easier to find.

A man comes running to the doctor shouting and screaming in pain. “Please doctor you’ve got to help me. I’ve been stung by a bee.” “Don’t worry;” says the doctor. “I’ll put some cream on it.” “You will never find that bee. It must be miles away by now.” “No, you don’t understand,” says the doctor. “I’ll put some cream on the place you were stung.” “Oh! It happened in the garden in back of my house.” “No, no, no!” says the doctor getting frustrated. “I mean on which part of your body did that bee sting you?” “On my finger!” screamed the man in pain. “The bee stung me on my finger and it really hurts.” “Which one?” the doctor says. “How am I supposed to know? All bees look the same to me!”

From a FB post. sorry I don’t have a better reference.

All the humor in this joke depends on the misunderstanding caused by antecedents being misunderstood. Well, it helps to not picture the body language…