Let’s dive right in, to a back-and-forth on Facebook yesterday between Gadi Niram and me:
— GN: Pick a color from 1 to 10. [AZ thinks: obviously, lavender 7 — something that’s both a color and also a number from 1 to 10]
— AZ [actual reply]: parsley [something from yet a third, hitherto unmentioned, category, herbs] … alternatively: Benjamin Harrison [US Presidents] [separately, continuing the Still Another Category theme, Sophie Silberpup suggested: antelope, in the animals category]
[now breaking out into the form of three-part solutions to the mystery in the board game Clue] titanium, in 753 BC, with a ball-peen hammer [titanium, located in 753 BC, killed the victim using a ball-peen hammer]
— GN: You crack me up, dude!
— AZ: Three more shots [each a triple: responsible person or thing, location in space or time, instrument or accompaniment], dude, and then I rest.
Minerva, in Flagstaff, with a night-blooming cereus … a jackalope, in Ursa Major, with John Waters … the ulna, in Narnia, with Moomins
I note that the responses seem to be crystallizing, developing some internal organization, over time. Starting to approach poetry, rather than pleasurable nonsense.
Not that there’s anything wrong with pleasurable nonsense.
Error to joke. Gadi and I were producing a series of category errors — in this case treating things from one category as if they belonged to another (colors, numbers, herbs, US Presidents, animals, chemical elements, famous dates, tools, Greek gods, cities in Arizona, flowers, imaginary crossbreeds, constellations, film directors, bones of the human body, fictional places, fictional beings). Many people have remarked that in English, the technical names of flowers and the medical names of diseases are easily confounded (consider the medical diagnosis coreopsis has set in in Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”). I have always thought that a potentilla infection would probably be fatal, though a cheering bouquet of psittacosis might help the patient recover after all,
Gadi and I have taken what would in our daily lives be errors — unfortunate events — and made them into jokes. In everyday miniature, the transformation that Marx famously wrote about:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)
(On Marx’s essay, see the Wikipedia entry about it.)
Most other types of slips have their joke counterparts: transpositional errors come around as Spooneristic jokes (boyfoot bear with teak of Chan); Fay-Cutler malapropisms reappear as imperfect puns (with fronds like these, who needs anemones); and so on.
Category errors. From the Wikipedia entry:
A category mistake (or category error, categorical mistake, or mistake of category) is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. An example is a person learning that the game of cricket involves team spirit, and after being given a demonstration of each player’s role, asking which player performs the “team spirit”.
… The term “category-mistake” was introduced by Gilbert Ryle in his book The Concept of Mind (1949) to remove what he argued to be a confusion over the nature of mind born from Cartesian metaphysics. Ryle argues that it is a mistake to treat the mind as an object made of an immaterial substance because predications of substance are not meaningful for a collection of dispositions and capacities.
The notion of category error became prominent in 20th-century analytic philosophy, with reference to the categories of this framework. But it can be imported into the very much larger world of categorization and labeling (a world I return to again and again on this blog), where there are many taxonomies, for different purposes (some are technical taxonomies, for various special purposes; others are folk taxonomies, for everyday purposes — though the line between these is not always so clear), with categories at many levels, often with categories that are less than ideal, and with a considerable number of unlabeled folk taxons. At least this.
In a system of this complexity, there are plenty of opportunities for people to make category errors in coping with the word around them.
And if there are errors, there can be jokes.
November 9, 2025 at 12:56 am |
Category error is the key to the rhetorical form called ‘zeugma’ (yoking), which I and many others use for jokes. Zeugma, a term I learned from Laura Michaelis, is the conjoining of two terms belonging to different categories, as in ‘I lost my keys and my temper’ or ‘He ate his Brussels sprouts and his words.’
November 9, 2025 at 5:26 am |
There’s some connection, but the crucial element in zeugma isn’t the conjuncts, but the material they share, which is being used in two senses simultaneously; from that it follows that the conjuncts will probably be of different types.
There’s a Page on this blog with links to postings on AZBlog on zeugmoids, plus some postings on Language Log and AZBlog on zeugma; these are perennial topics in my writing:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/linguistics-notes/zeugmoids-and-zeugma/