Few of us have not at one time or another spoken to our Spanish classes in glowing and expansive terms about riqueza del idioma. As speakers of Spanish we are able to experience this richness; and with varying degrees of success, through our reliance on language and cultural texts, on movies, tapes, anecdotes about our experiences living and working abroad, collections of idioms, and so on, many of our students come to share the experience with us. We can do still more to further our students' appreciation of the variety and richness of the language by introducing them to a widespread and until now overlooked cultural phenomenon: the use of puns in contemporary Spanish advertising. A caveat before we move on to consider examples of puns drawn from billboard, magazine, newspaper, and television ads: I'll be using the term in this article in a relatively broad sense. As Redfern has pointed out, is an but convenient tag for a whole variety of rhetorical devices which play on words: the term takes in the traductio, antanaclasis, adnominatio, homonymia, amphibolia, quiproquo, paranomasia, adfictio, skesis, polyptoton, and more (6-10). For our purposes, to observe such fine distinctions would hinder more than help: what we are after is a sense of how the in all its varieties, can help us--and hence our studentsgain a fuller understanding of Spanish culture. As Mahood noted in her study of Shakespeare's punning, naming the parts does not show us what makes the gun go off' (19). The more inclusive Spanish term juego de palabras comes closer to describing the territory through which we'll be traveling than does either the inaccurate and restrictive or the equally restrictive Spanish term retru6cano which is at any rate arcane enough to be unfamiliar to many native speakers. As we will see, the idea of a juego de palabras also has the advantage of clearly capturing the sense of playfulness inherent to many Spanish advertising puns. Thus while for the sake of economy I'll continue at times to use the less cumbersome English term pun, it's the juego de palabras which most fully describes the sort of linguistic activity we'll be examiningwhether such activity is found in Spanish or in American advertising. The use of advertising puns in a foreign language class forces a teacher to address a thorny issue: that is, whether or not the advertising of a given culture adequately or accurately reflects the values and traditions native to that culture. When I first pointed out to my students how commonplace punning had become in Spanish advertising, I believed that I was introducing them to a late twentieth-century legacy, albeit a technologically updated version, of the rich tradition of word play we find in Hispanic literature-and not only in the works of Siglo de Oro writers like Cervantes or Quevedo, but in works by modern writers as well. In La de Bringas, for instance, Perez Gald6s had underlined his character Francisco Bringas's blindness to the real conditions prevailing in the world around him by (temporarily) rendering him physically blind, and then had heightened the reader's ironic awareness of Bringas's moral and psychological blindness by having his character inadvertently pun about his condition in lines like, alegraria mucho de no tener que Ilamar a un oculista, pues estos, aunque curen, siempre cuestan un ojo de la cara (149).1 More recently Rosario Castellanos in her poem Economia domestica had played on two meanings of the homonym regla--a rule and a woman's period-in her persona's comments on the roots of her feminine identity: He aqui la regla de oro ... la regla de oro que me di6 mi madre (301). 2 Thus when I stumbled onto a multitude