Zeugma

I caught part of an episode of Nova last week. It described the efforts of archaeologists to preserve as much of an ancient Roman city as possible before the site is flooded by a new Turkish hydroelectric dam on the Euphrates. As I watched, I kept thinking, "Zeugma? Haven't I heard that word somewhere before?"

It turns out that zeugma is a term for a kind of parallel construction where the parts aren't exactly parallel. Apparently it's derived from the Greek word for "yoke", but none of the dictionaries I checked suggested a connection between the rhetorical term and the name of the city (but there's a theory on this page).

My definition of zeugma wasn't very clear, so here's the OED's:

A figure by which a single word is made to refer to two or more words in the sentence; esp. when properly applying in sense to only one of them, or applying to them in different senses; but formerly more widely, including, e.g., the use of the same predicate, without repetition, with two or more subjects; also sometimes applied to cases of irregular construction, in which the single word agrees grammatically with only one of the other words to which it refers (more properly called SYLLEPSIS).

That's still pretty dense—I think a few examples are in order. From the definition at Dictionary.com:

He took my advice and my wallet.

From the definition at TheFreeDictionary.com (which they fail to credit to Charles Dickens):

Mr. Pickwick took his hat and his leave.

From a page at BYU about zeugma:

As Virgil guided Dante through Inferno, the Sibyl Aeneas Avernus. —Roger D. Scott

This last one is interesting. It looks a bit like garden variety gapping, except that both the verb guided and the preposition through are omitted in the second clause. I have to say that if you prompted me with this sentence in a grammaticality survey, I'd give it a star-and-a-half, but apparently Roger D. Scott thought it was grammatical. Rare and marginal rhetorical constructions like this must surely be learned after primary language acquisition—I still haven't acquired this one, apparently. That makes appealing the idea that there is a core grammar with peripheral constructions added later, although the question of where core stops and periphery begins is still murky, maybe so murky that it's not really a difference in kind, but only of degree.

[By the way, there's also a post over at φλυζειν about the deterioration of the mosaics at Zeugma.]

[Now playing: "Divine Hammer" by the Breeders]