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. Zeugmas in coordination can generally be converted to zeugmoids by repeating the relevant expression-token:
… he hastened to put out the cat, put out the wine, put out his cigar, and put out the lamps
It would be nice to have more real (rather than invented) examples of zeugmoids.
(Thanks to Steven Levine for suggesting a connection between the Tom Corbett example and zeugma.)