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 .
Language Log’s Arnold Zwicky, writing in his personal blog:
A final linguistic note, with a story about my colleague Paul Kiparsky, who long ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts, confronted an American supermarket while on a search for toilet paper. One after another, he inspected the choices, noting that they claimed to be “facial quality tissue”, eventually complaining forcefully, “I don’t want facial quality tissue, I want RECTAL quality tissue”. (You have to imagine the Finnish accent.)
