This week: We ride straight to the halls of “Of course there’s a word for that!” and explore a literary trick for making a verb sit up and dance. And then we talk about some other stuff. Away we go!
Zeugmatic
As I get older, the list of words that I knew, or think I knew but maybe forgot, but I’m pretty sure I knew that one gets longer and then, by all the gods, longer still. This is especially true with the specific names of literary tricks I studied back in the dark ages of my schooling but have had little time for since.
In this case, I overheard1 a couple of teachers at work. One said something like, “That raises a question.” The other replied, “But not my standards!” And I thought, “Clever. Hang on. There’s a word for that kind of wordplay…” And then, out of nowhere, I remembered that Neil Gaiman had written about this way back in the early 2000s2.
From a blogpost dated 7 January, 2004, Neil writes:
I also couldn't remember the word zeugma , so I left it off. And on waking this morning I thought "Zeugma!" but it was too late.
Zeugma is a word for when you make a verb do several functions at the same time (eg. "I left in a foul mood and a black taxi”).
There it is. Zeugma. Then, not doubting Neil Gaiman3 at all, but wanting a more, uhm, professional definition, I turned to my handy-dandy Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms:
Zeugma
a figure of speech by which one word refers to two others in the same sentence. Literally a ‘yoking’, zeugma may be achieved by a verb or preposition with two objects, as in the final line of Shakespeare’s 128th sonnet: Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.
Cool. Mystery solved and back to wandering the halls in search of problems to avoid I go4. Only I hadn’t read quite far enough in the dictionary. It continues:
However, the term is frequently uses as a synonym for syllepsis - a special kind of zeugma in which the yoking term agrees grammatically with only one of the terms to which it is applied, or refers to each in a different sense.
Well, hold the damn phone a minute. Flip over to the “S” entries…
Syllepsis
a construction in which one word (usually a verb or preposition) is applied to two other words or phrases, either ungrammatically or in two differing senses. In the first case, the verb or preposition agrees grammatically with only one of the two elements which it governs…In the second case, the word also appears only once but is applied twice in differing senses (often an abstract sense and a concrete sense)…
And then, here’s the key bit:
A more far-fetched instance occurs in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers when it is said of a character that she ‘went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair’. There is usually a kind of pun involved in this kind of syllepsis.
Bingo.
So. In both Neil and Bill’s examples5, the verb acts on both objects in a similar manner, which we can see most easily by playing the synonym game. In Neil’s sentence, I could use “departed” to replace “left” in both clauses and in Bill’s, I could use “assign” for each one. But in the conversation I had overheard, “raise” in the first clause is most easily replaced by “ask” while “lifts” is best used in the second. But the key distinction, I think is that the teachers I overheard played off each other to form an indirectly stated pun. Which is, I think, a syllepsis.
But, then again, a syllepsis is just a kind of zeugma, and, as the dictionary notes, “The term is frequently used interchangeably with zeugma, attempts to distinguish the two having in confusion,” rendering all of the above a moot point and my heart heavy in the process6.
Got a favorite zeugma, sylleptic or otherwise? Drop it in the comments and have a great week!
Down the Rabbit Hole
Everyone has a piece of art that they imprinted on when they were too young to know what kind of lasting impression it would have on their lives. Mine was the orange-and-pink day-glo poster for the Endless Summer. I first saw the poster and the movie when I was six or seven. I was staying at my friend’s house and his dad showed it to us. Loved the movie, loved the poster even more.
Over the year’s it’s informed my love of pop art, the 60s surf aesthetic, and even ‘zine culture in the 80s and 90s. Even now, I have three different representations of it close to hand - I’ve got a poster, a post card, and a light switch cover7. But where does it come from? Down the Rabbit Hole we go:
Los Angeles Magazine - The Story Behind the Endless Summer Poster, from The Artist Who Created It
Hamilton-Selway Fine Art - Andy Warhols Silk Screening Process
My Modern Met - 10 Print Artists That Will Inspire You to Try Silk Screen Printing at Home
From the Archives
In Neil Gaiman’s blog post (linked above) a fan writes in to tell Neil a word he had forgotten: dactyl, which is, “A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables.” (Source: Poetry Foundation.) Cool. I’m not great with poetic feet, but I have written about them before. In Volume 4 of Learned, I spent a month or so discussing poetry and some of its odder byways, like metrical feet. From November, 2021, Iamblech Pentamblech:
I don’t make a habit out of eavesdropping, but it’s a small school and sound carries down tiled hallways, you know?
For what it’s worth, and for the young’uns on here, Neil Gaiman (and George R.R. Martin and others) having blogs where they would actually interact with fan-letters and answer questions about writing and life was truly novel. I think we get kind of jaded today and expect everyone to be on social media, but to the authors who paved the way, I’m grateful.
We do try to avoid heresy whenever possible.
To the tune of “Over the River and Through the Woods.” I mean, not really, but if you sing as badly as I do, it might.
Why stand on formality when you don’t have to?
C’mon, you chuckled at that. Just a little.
The latter two were gifts, but that just means I appreciate them even more.