Barbel or Babel – clever pun by Douglas Adams?

So, am reading and enjoying “Cast in Order of Disappearance,” a 1975 book by Simon Brett. It’s a comic murder mystery, the one that introduces semi-alcoholic actor Charles Parris (played by Bill Nighy in the radio adaptations).

At one point Charles goes fishing with his son-in-law, and the word barbel leapt off the page. So, I added it to my vocabulation page. A barbel, is, well, let me wikipedia that for you-

The common barbel (Barbus barbus) is a species of freshwater fish belonging to the family Cyprinidae. It shares the common name ‘barbel’ with its many relatives in the genus Barbus, of which it is the type species. In Great Britain it is usually referred to simply as the barbel; similar names are used elsewhere in Europe, such as barbeau in France and flodbarb in Sweden.^[2] The name derives from the four whiskerlike structures located at the corners of the fish’s mouth, which it uses to locate food.

I assume that Douglas Adams knew this and concocted a bravura bit of punnery/word play for his Babel Fish.

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.