My wife said the difference between two medications might be the coating, I thought, but then I wondered if she had said codeine. Then it occurred to me that this was a pun as well as a source of confusion. Codeine differs from coating in both stress pattern (one stress on coating but a primary and secondary stress on codeine) as well as the final consonant (-ng in coating and n in codeine), yet in speech they are similar though not identical, and that, to me, is the difference between a pun and simple word play.
My question is: do most fl teachers get enough linguistics to understand issues like morphemes, phonemes, phones, and stress patterns?