This one’s for your brain and your work.
When it comes to grammar, I’m a weekend warrior. It feels a bit too constrictive for me to embrace: the rules of grammar seem only designed to perpetuate arguments.
But rhetoric gets me going. It might be heretical to say it, but grammar is for pedants. It’s all attempts to govern and organise speech: writing is wonderful, but speech clearly came first.
Rhetoric is creative and proactive. It’s not just about how we communicate ideas, but about how they’re received. I think more copywriters ought to immerse themselves in the world of rhetoric because it is guaranteed to improve their writing.
Rhetoric is also the field in which you’ll come across my favourite technique: Zeugma.
Zeugma is not, of course, an ancient god. Zeugma is a Greek term that means “a yoking”. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines zeugma as any case of parallelism and ellipsis working together so that a single word governs two or more other parts of a sentence.
What an awful sentence to read. Let me break it down: zeugma is a technique wherein one word changes meaning to link (or ‘yoke’) two or more ideas together.
Sometimes it’s treated as a synonym for the other excellently-named “syllepsis”, though I’ll be honest: I don’t fully understand the difference between the two of them, and it seems grammarians can’t agree anyway, so that’s okay with me.
Zeugma is more fun to say, so we’ll go with that.
What the hell is a zeugma?
Here’s an example:
He took his hat, and his leave.
The sentence is grammatically correct, but something seems ‘off’ at first reading. Something doesn’t quite make sense. And yet, after a moment, it does: we realise that the writer is playing with multiple meanings of “took”, and once we realise that, there’s a little fizz of satisfaction.
Here’s another example:
Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.
“Fill” is the word doing double duty, and the humour comes from the linking of ‘wind’ and ‘self-righteousness’.
I like sticky puns
In a way, a pun is an example of zeugma - specifically, the type of written (rather than auditory, like the above heading) pun we find most in advertising:
“We go a long way for you”
“Nothing runs like a Deere”
“Imagination at work”
“Go”, “Runs” and “Work” are all doing the work (though ‘Deere’ clearly has a role to play).
Puns get a bad rap, but the best ones are precious gems. They’re often very memorable, or as Chip Heath would say, “sticky”.
And the stickiest puns work because they are ever so slightly jarring. We don’t ‘get it’ straight away. We have to do a second take.
That’s why zeugma shines as a technique. It’s a tool for intentionally breaking our ideas and artfully putting them back together. It’s fun to use because it wobbles the human brain both in the creation and the interpretation.
And it works for the audience because, by omitting a word, we leave a tiny gap (yes, one of my favourite topics) for the audience to get it.
Tiny gaps
Going back to the first example, the ‘tiny gap’ is created by making one word (took) do double duty.
He took his hat and his leave.
Compare this with:
He took his hat, and he took his leave.
Sure the second one works, but the first one is clearly better.
It’s craft by omission. Cutting a second use of the word ‘took’ is what makes it work, and what gives us as readers a chance to engage more, to invest a little bit of brain power in making sense of it.
And here, from the minds of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, is another example we could play with.
She blew her nose and then she blew my mind.
This isn’t zeugma. Why? Because ‘blew’ is used twice, once for each meaning. It’s still funny and works well as a lyric. But perhaps a writer might put it as:
“She blew her nose, then my mind.”
I’m not saying it’s better - but it’s an interesting shift.
So, how is any of this useful?
Well, I often use it when working on things like taglines. There’s no real formula or recipe for using zeugma; sometimes I just like to read the rather boring, generic features & benefits list and look for words (verbs are especially rich) that have multiple common meanings. It could lead me to things like:
Action Bars: a taste for adventure.
Black Box suitcases: Time to pack it all in.
They’re puns, in a way, but with a little more going on beneath the surface. I think that’s because they start with a bit of focus - I am looking for a relevant word that can do two things, rather than simply making a joke and hoping it lands.
Sometimes you might land on a bit of zeugma that makes you kiss your fingers and eat a biscuit in celebration. More often, it’s just a good way of having fun with language and unblocking your creative pipes.
Give it a go: share your best zeugma in the comments!