Cool Word: Zeugma
While we were editing our final paper for CS376, Steve mentioned Zeugmas to me, but had a hard time explaining it. We looked it up on Wikipedia, and here’s what we found.
Zeugma (from the Greek word “ζεύγμα”, meaning “yoke”) is a figure of speech describing the joining of two or more parts of a sentence with a single common verb or noun. A zeugma employs both ellipsis, the omission of words which are easily understood, and parallelism, the balance of several words or phrases. The result is a series of similar phrases joined or yoked together by a common and implied noun or verb.
There are a number of geeky examples:
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: “You are free to execute your laws, and your citizens, as you see fit.”
(I have no idea what episode that’s from, and I’m quite curious.) - Numerical Recipes: “Come the (computer) revolution, all persons found guilty of such criminal behavior will be summarily executed, and their programs won’t be!”
And a number of funny examples:
- Charles Dickens: “[She] went straight home in a flood of tears, and a sedan chair.”
- Groucho Marx: “You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that’s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.”
- Flanders and Swann, “Madeira M’Dear”:
- “He said, as he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar and the lamps…”
- “She lowered her standards by raising her glass, her courage, her eyes and his hopes”
- Bob Kanefsky: “Did she turn down the wrong hallway, his advances, or the sheet?”