Hairdressers seem particularly prone to them – “Hair today, gone tomorrow”, “Hair apparent”.

Garden landscapers are often close behind – “I dig gardening”, “Gardeners know all the dirt”.

We’re talking puns, word play which hopefully raises a smile (as an aside, the language knowledge needed to understand a pun is very sophisticated. This is because they require the processing of the sound and meaning of words twice, and this seemingly simple task requires considerable language agility).

But puns can be slippery turns of speech to have in your first, most important message.

Customers mightn’t get the joke.

The term you use may indeed be clever, but has nothing to do with your business.

A pun may position you as being more frivolous than is ideal.

Most of all, it is probably a missed opportunity to give those fleeting eyeballs a reason to linger longer, and explore further because the emotion and rationale parts of their brain have been intrigued by a great, first most important story.

Now there’s nothing wrong with a bit of word play, a bit of fun further on in your copy, it’s just risky using a pun first up.

Having said that, here’s a pun which is also part of the business name – which does a lot of heavy lifting in giving you a feel of who they are.

These guys ply their trade in my neighbourhood.

Good Natured Garden Services – a pun that works!