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Anyone who knows me knows that I have a very special place in my heart for puns and wordplay. In today’s issue of the Salt Lake Tribune, Paul Rolly included several puns from an “earlier” edition of the Washington Post. I’d come across these well over a year ago, and enjoyed them enough to pass them onto a good friend who appreciated them but didn’t fully trust their attributed source.

The vague wording in Rolly’s column renewed my interest in finding the original source. After spending a few minutes with Google, I got my answer. (Seriously, what did we do before Google?) Turns out, these were first published as part of the Washington Post’s Style Invitational column. From 1998.

Seriously, 1998?! Think back to 1998—back when politics was dominated by the Lewinsky scandal, back when Michael Jordan beat the Utah Jazz in the NBA finals (again), and back when N*Sync was cool. Are you kidding? Essentially, this columnist decided it wasn’t enough to forward this to everyone in his contact list—rather, he had to forward it to everyone within the newspaper’s circulation.

For the record, yes, I still think the wordplay is amusing. But not nearly as amusing as the fact that the Salt Lake Tribune actually paid someone to publish this.