Forms
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
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 PoetryReturn to home