today I went out to get some research started with two other people i’m working with and we ended up on this fairly treacherous cliff/slope spot trying to navigate to some tricky coordinates and one of my group members slipped on the slope and started sliding and he reached out and grabbed for a sapling and the ground was so loose it just started going down with him and I was too far away to immediately help him but I wanted to alert my other group member to his peril but I fuckin’ panicked and I just said “THERE he GOES”
if you ever feel you didn’t respond correctly to a situation, ask yourself if you watched someone all but totally fall off a cliff and said “there he goes”
OBVIOUSLY he’s okay or I wouldn’t have posted about it. He got another, sturdier tree.
one time i was camping with my gf in a park that had hella bears and it was dark and we were sitting around the campfire and i had the sudden inkling to turn around and there was a bear not five feet behind me and my first instinct was to say “HEY. YOURE not supposed to be here!” and i feel like that has very similar energy
I don’t know if that’s meant in a metaphorical way as in, “their insults have no bite” or a literal sense as in “someone was talking shit so he got his fucking teeth knocked out” but I like it either way
and it’s a zeugma where one of the words is literal and one is metaphorical which is the BEST KIND
I didn’t know about zeugmas until just now! That is so awesome, everybody:
zeug·ma
ˈzo͞oɡmə/
noun
a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g.,John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts ).
She dropped her dress and inhibitions at the door.
What’s this? My favorite rhetorical device showing up on my dashboard?
IT HAS A NAMEEEE!! OH MY GOD!!!
So this is what I’ve been looking for! I knew there was something I could have included to improve my writing. So happy I found this post!
Some of these could be considered paraprosdokians! (One of my favorite things!)
A paraprosdokian (/pærəprɒsˈdoʊkiən/) is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence, phrase, or larger discourse is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax. For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists. Some paraprosdokians not only change the meaning of an early phrase, but they also play on the double meaning of a particular word, creating a form of syllepsis.
“So Bob said […]” indicates that I am directly quoting Bob.
“Then Bob was like […]” indicates that I am paraphrasing Bob.
“And Bob was all […]” indicates that I am paraphrasing Bob, and additionally I am being a dick about it.
I don’t know about you, but I think it’s fantastic that we have a specific grammatical convention for that.
What I find most frustrating is when people don’t understand this! I don’t know if it’s a generation thing, but sometimes I’ll be talking and say “So I was like “are you fucking kidding me” and the person will look at me all horrified and say “you didn’t actually say that, did you?”
artherra 