Arnold Zwicky quotes a classic example of zeugma:
… he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar, and the lamps.
I note, however, that put out, without an object, has its own idiomatic meaning. I therefore propose a new construction, Extreme ZeugmaTM:
I want to date a girl who puts out the wine, the lamps, and .
The rhetors already beat you to it; it's called syllepsis.
ReplyDeleteI agree that it's an example of syllepsis, but so was the example quoted by Zwicky. The defining quality of my construction was the empty final clause ("I want to date a girl who puts out.") That's not something that's routinely seen in syllepsis.
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