Figures of speech – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
Archive for the ‘Figures of speech’ Category
At the zeugmoid laundry
December 3, 2025
A tv commercial for the laundry detergent Tide, heard this morning:
If it’s got to be clean, then it’s got to be Tide [1]
(with the deontic modal of obligation have got to, roughly ‘must’). At this point, I’ll simplify the example somewhat by using the one-word variant have to rather than have got to:
If it has to be clean, then it has to be Tide [2]
[1] and [2] catch your attention because they’re somehow jokey, some kind of play on words. The two parallel underlined stretches are word-for-word identical, but they’re not parallel in meaning, and we expect them to be. This semantic disparity makes [1] and [2] examples of what I’ve called zeugmoids. More on all that to come, but first I want to make the phenomenon clearer.
Posted in Context, Figures of speech, Humor, Modality, Pragmatics, Salience, Zeugma | Leave a Comment »
Formulaic happiness
September 2, 2024
In today’s Piccolo / Price Rhymes With Orange, the clams are tenting tonight on the old campground, but find today’s experience to be unaccountably joyless; for some reason, the formulas just aren’t working:
To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize two similarity-based formulaic expressions of English: the metaphor happy camper and the simile happy as a clam; yet neither is overt in the cartoon, though both are alluded to indirectly (we’re campers and we’re clams)
Posted in Figures of speech, Idioms, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Simile, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
Proleptic toast
January 10, 2015
Musing on the line “You’re toast!” — a usage that turns out to be only about 30 years old.
Posted in Figures of speech, Slang | Leave a Comment »