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.
Full parallelism. Compare [2] with two fully parallel examples:
If it has to be clean, then it (also) has to be starched [3] — with parallel predicate adjectivals (PrAdj)
If it has to be a laundry detergent, then it (specifically) has to be Tide [4] — with parallel predicate nominals (PrNom)
In [3], the referent of of the pronoun it is some object O (for example, an article of clothing) that is salient in the context, and the obligation is on the addressee of [3] to cause O to be PrAdj, to make O be PrAdj. Make my underwear clean, make it starched.
In [4], the referent of the pronoun it is some substance S (for example, a cleaning agent) that is salient in the context, and the obligation is on the addressee of [4] to come to have S, to make S theirs, to select S (by, say, purchasing it). Select that cleanser, select Tide.
The problem with [2], then, is that the first it has to be has the semantics of [3], while the second has the very different semantics of [4]. So, in trying to understand [2], we’re whipped around from one frame to another. The surprise of this shift is what makes [2] funny.
Zeugmoids. From my 11/17/10 posting “Zeugmoids”:
Not long before the use of pal in Tom Corbett, Space Cadet that I reported on here came another notable utterance:
If you could shoot off a warhead the way you shoot off your mouth, maybe you’d have a chance.
This has two structurally parallel occurrences of shoot off, but in two different senses — the first involving literal shooting, the second in an idiom:
slang (orig. U.S.). to shoot off one’s mouth: to talk indiscreetly or abusively; to talk unrestrainedly or at length, to assert one’s opinions; to boast or brag. (OED2)
This isn’t exactly zeugma, since no expression-token is being used in more than one sense, as put out is used in Flanders and Swann’s celebrated:
… he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar, and the lamps
Instead, we have two identical expression-tokens, each representing a different expression-type. It might easily take a moment for the hearer to cope with the switch from one meaning to another. The effect comes about through the phonological identity of the two expression-token — “If you could shoot off a warhead the way you talk a good game,…” conveys roughly the same content, with the parallelism, but without the phonological identity or the momentary processing difficulty — so it’s reminiscent of zeugma.
I offer the term zeugmoid for such examples.
There’s a Page on this blog with links to my postings about zeugmoids (and zeugma).
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