[Orual]

Sou seeghareeteeria!! Pardon the transliteration - couldn't get the Greek letters to work here.

More than you ever wanted or needed to know:

"When a single word that governs or modifies two or more others must be understood differently with respect to each of those words. This combination of parallelism and incongruity often has a witty or comical effect. Not to be confused with zeugma. Not to be confused with zeugma.

Originally, syllepsis named that grammatical incongruity resulting when a word governing two or more others could not agree with both or all of them; for example, when a singular verb serves as the predicate to two subjects, singular and plural ("His boat and his riches is sinking"). In the rhetorical sense, syllepsis has more to do with applying the same single word to the others it governs in distinct senses (e.g., literal and metaphorical); thus, "His boat and his dreams sank."

[Mia T]

Thanx for the interesting info.

In sylleptic terms,

had Schlesinger

lost his bow tie with his mind,

that particular syllepsis would have never been. ;)

[beckett]

Mia and I go way back to a Usenet board on AOL. Some of her brilliant material can be traced to things she wrote then. In particular, her reference to the "excitable and lying old lady" of history was part of a posting from those days. Then she phrased it, "Someone--I forget who-- once called history "that excitable and lying old lady." Naively believing that she sincerely forgot who said such a thing, and at the time not realizing how deeply literate she is, I researched the question and found it was de Maupassant, something I'm sure Mia knew all along.

Mia now includes de Maupassant's name in that particular piece. I like to think she does it to avoid confusing some of us whose gift for words isn't as abundant as hers. I have a proprietary feeling for the alteration (deserved or not, I really don't know), and I consider it my contribution to her impressive, creative and brilliant body of work.