On my travels examward, I recently learned a new word: "zeugma". It's a classical rhetorical device whereby a word (usually a verb) is made to refer to two or more disparate things. Anyway, this welcome addition to my vocabulary reminded me of an old Flanders & Swann song - containing the best uses of zeugma in the English language (he suggests provocatively)?
"He said, as he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar and the lamps..."
"She lowered her standards by raising her glass, her courage, her eyes and his hopes"
And best of all
"When he asked 'What in heaven?' she made no reply, up her mind and a dash for the door"
I've got a lot of time for Michael Flanders. A great wordsmith with an equally masterful delivery, he was also (I recently learned) an early champion of rights for the disabled, and his was probably the first wheelchair to make an appearance on the West End stage. Had I been 20 in 1967 when the above footage was filmed I would (I hope) have been hanging out with the hippies, and I suspect Flanders & Swann would have seemed a throwback to an outdated tradition of light entertainment - the sort of thing your parents and their friends would like. But from the standpoint of 2009, the two stances fortunately aren't mutually exclusive. (And actually, maybe they weren't then either: the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band were a kind of sillier, more psychedelic Flanders & Swann; Paul McCartney and Ray Davies both had/have music hall in their blood)
This is pretty funny, though:
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