Zeugma: When You Mean One Thing and Then Another

Sudden cognitive shifts have us howling with laughter and in horror

Aug 22, 2022

Comedy and horror hinge on thwarted expectations. When a punchline turns the set-up on its head, or a twist in a thriller shatters our uneasy peace, we experience a cognitive shift. That delectable frisson is the spice of life; we alone of all creatures are sophisticated enough to chase it.

Humour

The mood-enhancing effects of endorphins aside, when we're wracked with laughter, we involuntarily tense and relax our core. When laughter peters out, this release of tension results in a decrease in heart rate and drop in blood pressure, prompting mental relaxation through the powerful mind-body connection. (See my article on embodied cognition.)

Due to motor empathy, observing slapstick provokes laughter. Likewise, activation of the brain’s motor system can be elicited by reading descriptions of physical comedy.

If, while engrossed in a novel, our mental image of a self-styled adventurer charging a foe, lance couched, were suddenly updated with the added detail of his horse slowly wading through water*, we would experience accompanying shifts in our muscle tone, triggering kinesic humour.

Kinesic humour explains the aptly titled video clip John Malkovich Can’t Cope with Aisling Bea’s Malaysian Stand-Up Story. Comedian Aisling Bea has actor John Malkovich—no relation to the film Being John Malkovich—in stitches after miming a stumbling walk, and then an equally jerky belly laugh.

Horror

Similarly, the horror genre relies on cognitive whiplash, whether through a sudden change in the tempo and volume of background music accompanying the reveal of a knife-wielding maniac’s reflection in a mirror cabinet or at the glacial pace of a sleepy English village unravelling an incongruously dark secret over the course of four-hundred pages.

While the comedy and horror genres are both designed to thrill, the difference is that the rising action in horror ends with bodily tension rather than its subsequent release. In either case, we are reminded that in an uncertain world, normality can give way to the absurd and nightmarish in the blink of an eye.

Zeugmas and related figures of speech

One of the simplest ways to warm with laughter or chill with terror by way of a cognitive shift is by using rhetorical device known as a zeugma (zoog-muh).

A zeugma uses the same word in two different ways. The same word does double duty, paying its due to two different concepts. Zeugmas are often deployed for humorous effect, such as in “Take a seat and a chill pill”. I, myself, was introduced to the concept via The Lion King, wherein the usurper Scar sings his “ambitions and teeth are bared”.

Speaking of scheming usurpers, one of my favourite zeugmatic phrases caused me to physically recoil during a performance of Richard III. The cutthroat king confesses to murdering his nephews the young princes while promising to produce new heirs with their mother with the line, “But in your daughter’s womb I bury them”.

A truly distasteful line, albeit one that takes a beat to sink in. (The actor certainly seemed to savour the audience's delayed, collective groan.) Placing the deceased to rest deep underground and planting the seeds of new life couldn’t be farther from one another conceptually and yet, in this stomach-churning zeugma, “bury” encapsulates life and death in equal measure.

Puns

Back then I might have categorised “bury” as a dark pun. Now I wonder, what is the difference between a pun and a zeugma? Take a look at this zeugmatic phrase: “She ate her sandwich with gusto, relish, and pickles”. The word “eat” is applied to both manner and item but “relish” could well be an ingredient in an unusually piquant sandwich, meaning it’s also a pun. The plot thickens!

The difference between a pun and a zeugma appears to be that in the former the double-meaning is invoked incidentally or even unintentionally, necessitating a smug and self-satisfied “pardon the pun”. A pun's conceptual forking is there for the plucking but could be overlooked entirely without any loss of intended meaning. Furthermore, a pun can be achieved by a homophone rather than the same exact word.

Polyptotons

Another concept related to the zeugma is the polyptoton (polyp-to-ton) wherein the root of a word is referenced twice. In the song title Please Please Me, “please” is first used in the form of an adverb and then as a verb with a different meaning.

The Lord’s Prayer contains the lines “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” and “And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” where the use of the noun and verb forms distinguish our transgressions from those inflicted upon us.

In the rhetorical question “Who shall watch the watchmen?” the root word “watch” appears as a verb and then a noun; in the song lyric “people are strange when you’re a stranger”, “strange” is first an adjective and then a noun, and so forth.

With polyptoton, the word in question, despite being invoked twice, may express but a single concept, such as in the threat “you have laughed your last laugh*” or “you have quaffed your last quaff”. With this rhetorical device, it seems there is no obligation to invoke a secondary shade of meaning.

Strange to think that a word used only once (zeugma) could convey more information than that same word used twice (polyptoton). Is it not? It seems that much like alliteration, polyptoton’s purpose is mainly stylistic, a way of adding variety couched in the comfort of repetition.

(My theory is that we enjoy repetition in alliteration, rhyme, and musical phrases owing to the fact that predictable stimuli are easy to process, meaning the cognitive load is liberatingly light. We also revel in sweet anticipation and covetous craving as dopamine peaks before consummation as distinct from the pleasure of the reward itself.)

After reading about polyptoton in The Elements of Eloquence, I had a glorious moment while watching television where I quipped, Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style, “Oh, you’re not done, you’re done for!” of a certain doomed character. It would have been more glorious if it hadn’t been to an empty room, but at least, Dear Reader, I get to share it here with you.

I’ve also had a lot of fun thinking up zeugmas:

The butcher was mincing his meat and his words when I questioned him about the disappearance of the baker
The jeans and their owner were distressed
She pumped gas and her customers for information

Zeugmas reveal conceptual similarities and boundaries

The word “zeugma” is derived from the Ancient Greek word zeúgnumi meaning “to yoke or join”. Thus, zeugmas can make us appreciate that words are often conceptually more similar than their discrete dictionary definitions suggest.

For instance, someone who “fishes for trout and compliments” wants to neither spook a fish (while fishing a spook) nor be too overbearing in his or her quest for validation. Thus, the exploits of the fisherman and narcissist aren’t so different after all.

In my mincing butcher example, both senses of the word “mincing” refer to the act of minimising; reducing meat into small pieces or attempting to reveal very little with one’s remarks.

If I were going for a triple-barrelled zeugma (Down, Icarus!) and wrote that the butcher’s high heels gave him a mincing walk, this would once again be a reference to the core concept of minimising, in this case “to walk with small steps in a prim affected manner”. Thus, a gait, a manner of speech, and a method of meat preparation are all distinct yet subtly related concepts evoked through just one word.

In the jeans example, “distressed” refers to both a physical and emotional state, causing a pleasurable shift in our thinking and rapid, gratifying refinement of the predictive simulation our brain is constantly running to ensure our survival. Even so, a thread links the sense of “suffering from extreme anxiety, sorrow, or pain” with “having simulated marks of age and wear” considering being worried and worn down both require repetition that builds on itself.

Lastly, although gas/petrol is a physical substance while information is not, both meanings of the word "pumping” fill us with a sense of something being drawn to the surface and a sense of pressure.

By that same token, the fact that a phrase is zeugmatic in one language but not another reveals that there are many ways to slice and dice a concept that your native tongue may express as an indivisible monolith.

Zeugmas can also reveal concept boundaries and not just similarities, meaning they can challenge your worldview and the associations—or lack thereof—that you’ve taken for granted.

For example, in English, we use the verb “brush” for both teeth and hair. This means “she brushed her hair and her teeth” is a zeugmatic phrase. In the first instance, “brush” refers to detangling what may well be dirty hair, and in the second, the verb refers to the act of cleaning. In Italian, however, this phrase would be nonsensical, as the verb “wash” (lavare) is used for teeth as much as any other body part regardless of whether bristles are involved.

For this reason, filtering certain concepts through English has led me to fail to make the necessary fine-grained distinction in Russian.

I once perplexed my mother by referring to a dark blue pair of pants with the word for blue (“goluboy”, a prototypical sky-blue) instead of the word for navy blue (“siniy”), considered to be a separate colour. Of course, had we been conversing in English, calling that particular pair of trousers blue rather than navy blue would not have resulted in the impression of my being tragically colourblind.

Due again to failing to respect concept boundaries, I once had my grandmother in stitches when, looming over her, I remarked that she’s such a deep sleeper that for a moment I thought she had died. What provoked laughter was a child’s use of the word zdochla (for female animals) instead of umerla (for female people) for the monolithic “died” in English.

I’d wager that it’s in matters of consumption and consummation—whether of a relationship or a lifetime; “a consummation devoutly to be wished” as per Hamlet’s famous “To Be, or Not to Be” speech—where these fine-grained distinctions are most likely to lie—after all, when married couples lie together, they do not “fornicate”. And you wouldn't “tup” your partner, but a ram would a ewe.

In Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, the authors entreat us to “imagine a language (and a culture) that has no verb that applies to both men and to woman”. (Presumably gendered conjugations need not apply.) Such an exercise would make for fascinating Sci-fi fodder, but it’s not as if this isn’t true to a degree already.

If you live in the Anglosphere, even if you don’t come from a land Downunder, don’t you already know that horses sweat, men ~~plunder~~ perspire, and women glow?

Footnotes

*This (possibly hallucinated) scene from Don Quixote is rather similar to the Zamboni scene in Deadpool which took the audience from tensed to relaxed and dissolving into laughter at the moment the camera pans out.

**A phrase radically different to the allusions to animal cruelty inherent in “you have yakked your last yak”. And as lacking a double-meaning as “You have cooked your last cook, Hannibal Lecter” is marinated in.

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