Research
A construction in which a single word governs two others in different senses — as in "she broke his heart and his favourite mug"; zeugma and syllepsis overlap in grammar, compressing two ideas into one sentence for wit or emphasis.
Merriam-Webster gives two senses: “the use of a word to modify or govern syntactically two or more words with only one of which it formally agrees in gender, number, or case”, and “the use of a word in the same grammatical relation to two adjacent words in the context with one literal and the other metaphorical in sense”. From Greek syllēpsis, ultimately from syllambanein, “to gather together”. First recorded circa 1550. The second sense is the one that produces the memorable examples; the first is a grammatical mismatch few readers notice.
Merriam-Webster is cited here as the dictionary of record. Where a lexicon entry defines a word rather than a position, a dictionary is the primary source for it — there is no other body with standing over what a word means. The reading of how the term is used in research writing, above, is this lexicon’s own.
Rewritten from a truncated AJG archive entry, August 2026.
Developed by Amit Jain at allfrontierglobal.com
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Developed by Amit Jain at allfrontierglobal.com · purposed.in · purposed · purposed2 · merchcomp.com · uuka.org
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