Tom Swifties

"What is a Tom Swifty?" he asked ignorantly. Today's younger generation have never heard of these adverbial puns. To educate them I give you the following.

"Pass me the shellfish," said Tom crabbily.
"Can I go looking for the Grail again?" Tom requested.
"I unclogged the drain with a vacuum cleaner," Tom said succinctly.

A Tom Swifty (or Tom Swiftie) is a phrase in which a quoted sentence is linked by a pun to the manner in which it is attributed.

"I might as well be dead," Tom croaked.
"They had to amputate them both at the ankles," Tom said defeatedly.
"Who discovered radium?" asked Marie, curiously.

As the examples illustrate, the standard syntax is for the quoted sentence to be first, followed by the description of the act of speaking. The hypothetical speaker is usually, by convention, called "Tom" (or "he" or "she"), unless some other name is needed for the pun (as in the Marie Curie example above).
The name comes from the Tom Swift series of books (1910–1993), similar in many ways to the better-known Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, and, like them, produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. In this series, the young scientist hero, Tom Swift, underwent adventures involving rocket ships, ray-guns and other things he had invented. A stylistic idiosyncrasy of at least some books in this series was that the author Victor Appleton (Edward Stratemeyer, Howard Garis, or others in Stratemeyer's employ) went to great trouble to avoid repetition of the unadorned word "said", preferring alternative verbs as well as heavy use of adverbs and phrases describing the manner or circumstances of speaking. Since many adverbs end in "ly" this kind of pun was originally called a Tom Swiftly, the prime example being "We must hurry," said Tom Swiftly. At some point, this kind of humor was called a Tom Swifty, and that name is now more prevalent.



"I've had my left and right ventricles removed," Tom said half-heartedly.
"I think my tires are bald," Tom said warily.
"I hate milking cows," Tom uttered.
"I put all my money into an IRA," Tom said interestedly.
"I don't think that leprechaun is telling the truth," Tom implied.
"I think that wasp is in pain," Tom bemoaned.
"I took out the trash," Tom said literally.
"This dinner is made from young calves," Tom revealed.
"I cut my dog's toenails too far," Tom said quickly.
"You're burning the candle at both ends," Tom said wickedly.

More Tom Swifties here