Stan Kelly-Bootle: Budding
English schoolboy comics have always punned on the Russian ‘ov’=’off’
ending...It’s misleading to call these wordplays puerile ... I swear to
all Ye Gods that few Anglophones educated in an English primary school would
look beyond the obvious Scrotum-off pun blaring loud from VN’s Skrotomoff. The
very ‘off’ spelling leads us away from real Russian and towards a punning,
castrational climax. (Usually, the Russian ending is transliterated er er
literally as ‘-ov’ regardless of the phonetics.)
JM: Nabokov, at first, signed himself
Nabokoff ( we find offers of Davidoff cigars or Smirnoff
vodka, too) and this is why the "Skrotomoff" thing totally escaped me
(actually it's never been a topmost preoccupation for me)
In my opinion many such wordplays are
puerile - or juvenile, or trivial. On that matter I side
with Edmund Wilson (although Simon Karlinski's explanation about Russian punning
mollified me somewhat). The "Skrotomoff" was
rather adequate for Percy or Greg when reporting about their fight with
Van, though...