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CREATIVE WRITING
Interesting Juxtapositions, Unexpected Connections, and Moments of Humour
The magic art of saying more with less
When my children say, “Dad, can I ask you a question?” I ready myself to unzip my mind and my wallet.
Here, the verb unzip applies to both mind and wallet. This is an example of syllepsis. It is also an example of zeugma. And for the last three weeks, I’ve had a bugger of a job differentiating between the two.
Syllepsis and zeugma are figures of speech or rhetorical devices.
Syllepsis occurs when a single word governs multiple parts of a sentence, but the word’s meaning shifts depending on the context.
Here’s an example —
At a recent wedding ceremony, my friend Martin took four pints of beer, three slices of cake, two whiskies, one moment to regret the three, a misguided step toward the dance floor, his bride’s elbow to the ribs, his coat from the cloakroom, a cab he hadn’t called, and, somewhere between the hotel and a barrier on the Forth Road Bridge, a long hard look at his life choices.
Syllepsis allows me to remove ‘took’ from all the subsequent nouns. With the first three, these seem to make sense, but then the original ‘took’ applies to regret, a…
