Zeugma
A figure in which one word governs two or more others in different senses — often for wit or surprise.
Zeugma (from the Greek for 'yoking') is a figure of speech in which a single word — usually a verb or an adjective — is applied to two or more other words, but with a different meaning attached to each. The pleasure of the figure is the small double-take it forces on the reader.
The classic English example is Charles Dickens's 'Miss Bolo went straight home, in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair.' The verb 'went … in' governs both 'a flood of tears' and 'a sedan-chair', but in radically different senses. Alexander Pope's 'Or stain her honour, or her new brocade' is another textbook case.
Zeugma is one of the reasons certain quotations survive across centuries. The figure builds a small logical trap into the sentence; the reader steps into it, notices the shift, and remembers the line. When encountered in quotation, a zeugma is almost always intentional — worth flagging in commentary so its wit is not read as a mistake.
“You held your breath and the door for me.”
Keep reading the glossary
An ABBA word-order reversal — 'ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country'.
A grammatical balance of two opposed ideas — 'to be or not to be'.
A clever, often spontaneous remark that delivers humour through verbal ingenuity.
A figure that pairs two contradictory terms in a single phrase — 'deafening silence', 'bittersweet'.