Word of the Day
for Friday,
October 12, 2012
Zeugma \ZOOG-muh\, noun:
The use of a word to modify or govern two or more words when it
is appropriate to only one of them or is appropriate to each but in a different
way, as in to wage war and peace or On his fishing trip, he caught three trout
and a cold.
Of course, the zeugma
is not an eighteenth-century invention, but it was not handled before then with
such neatness and consciousness, and had not the same air of being the normal
process of thought.
-- William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
-- William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
If we take "We
will be proud of course the air will be" as a strong syntactical unit, a
complete sentence, the parallelism of "we will be" and "the air
will be" draws both these auxiliary phrases toward the yoke (or zeugma,
in rhetorical parlance) of the main verb phrase.
-- Cary Nelson, Ed Folsom, W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry
-- Cary Nelson, Ed Folsom, W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry
Zeugma stems from the Greek word of the same spelling which meant
"a yoking."
Thanks to: www.dictionary.com
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