Off-Topic: Syllepsis and Zeugma

It's Memorial Day in the US on Monday, and Cadence is off. So today is the day before a holiday. By tradition, I write about...whatever I feel like. So let's go with figures of speech.

Even before I became a professional writer, I had a fascination for some of the more obscure figures of speech. I had to learn what they meant in high school and somehow many of them stuck. For a start, they have such wonderful names. Simile and metaphor are boring compared to syllepsis and zeugma, or metonymy and synecdoche, or hyperbole and litotes. And the wonderful onomatopoeia, which sounds like something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (onomatopoeia are words that sound like themselves, like "ting" and "moo").

Of course, part of the reason for the weird names is that ancient Greek had similar figures of speech.

Syllepsis and Zeugma

These are sufficiently similar that it is not even completely clear which way round they are, or even whether they are different words for the same thing.

I was taught in school that syllepsis is where you use the same verb with multiple nouns, all of which are grammatically correct, but where the meaning of the verb varies across the nouns. One I remember from school is:

He bolted the door and his lunch.

Both "he bolted the door" and "he bolted his lunch" are syntactically and semantically correct, but the meaning of the verb "bolt" is different in the two cases.

One which I remember reading in some airport thriller novel:

He came in five minutes, blue jeans, a temper, and a taxi.

On the other hand, zeugma is a similar construction but where the verb, although grammatically correct, doesn't really work with all the nouns. For example:

She saw the thunder and lightning.

Of course, you can't actually see thunder, although there is nothing syntactically wrong with "she saw the thunder." But to say "she heard the thunder and saw the lightning" is ugly.

Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Merism

Metonymy is a figure of speech where instead of using the correct word, a different word intimately associated with the concept, is used instead. For example, using "the White House" to mean the administration, or Hollywood to refer to US cinema, or Bollywood to refer to Indian cinema. Closer to home, at least my home, Silicon Valley is often used to mean not the geographical area, but technology in general. Or Sand Hill Road is used to mean venture capital in general (never mind that many VCs have offices in other places). As you can see, even though you might not know the word metonymy, it is something you probably use on a daily basis...unlike syllepsis and zeugma.

Synecdoche is a special case of metonymy, where a part of the thing is used to mean the same thing. If you say "a dozen head of cattle", you'd be surprised if they didn't come with the rest of them attached to the heads. Or if you said "check out my new wheels," you'd be surprised to get to the parking lot to find just some wheels and not a car.

Similar is merism, where various attributes of something are used to refer to the whole thing or whole concept. For example, "to search high and low" means to look everywhere. Or "young and old" means everyone, not specifically only children and retirees.

Dysphemism

I'm sure you already know what a euphemism is, it is a fairly common word for things like saying "restroom" instead of "toilet" as Americans do (but other English-speaking countries generally do not). Surprisingly, since the Chinese are usually direct about this sort of thing, they call it 洗手间 (xi shou jian) which means "wash hands room". It's a good phrase to learn after hello 你好 (ni hao) and thank you 谢谢 (xie xie).

Dysphemism is the opposite, using a harsh or dramatic word instead of the real word, for effect:

"snail mail" for regular mail
"dead tree edition" for a magazine printed on paper

Hyperbole and Litotes

You probably know the word hyperbole, which is exaggeration for effect. Here are a few examples:

I'm so hungry I could eat a horse.

I've told you to send your weekly status a million times.

You probably know the literal meaning of "literal". So it is incorrect when you say "I literally exploded when he told me the bug wasn't fixed." But I think using "literally" when "figuratively" is really what is meant is just another example of hyperbole.

Did you know that the opposite to hyperbole is litotes? The British are famous for litotes, although usually it is just called understatement:

How was dinner?
Not bad.

That is high praise from a Brit.

Some people seem to reserve litotes for a specific type of understatement, where the opposite of what is meant is then negated. So "good" for "not bad", or "I don't think you'll be disappointed" meaning you'll be pleased.

Syntax and Semantics

Syntax and semantics come up not just in an ordinary language like English, but also computer languages. In Noam Chomsky's 1957 book Syntactic Structures (still in print), he came up with the sentence:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

as an example of a sentence that is syntactically correct but semantically meaningless.

You don't need to know much about computer scientists to guess that ever since there has been a cottage industry of people coming up with contrived ways to end up with someone saying that phrase in a context where it has a real meaning. In fact, in 1985, Stanford even held a competition for people to come up with stories with a limit of 100 words or 14 lines of verse—a sonnet's worth.

Here's the winning entry:

Thus Adam's Eden-plot in far-off time:
Colour-rampant flowers, trees a myriad green;
Helped by God-bless'd wind and temp'rate clime.
The path to primate knowledge unforseen,
He sleeps in peace at eve with Eve.
One apple later, he looks curiously
At the gardens of dichromates, in whom
colourless green ideas sleep furiously
then rage for birth each morning, until doom
Brings rainbows they at last perceive.

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