Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (4 page)

This sentence reminds us that the word “book” also denotes a more abstract concept — namely, the set of all copies available in stores or warehouses. Are we thus in the presence of
one
concept, or of
two
? And when someone says, “I’m translating this book into English”, are they using a third sense of the word? How many subtly distinct concepts secretly coexist in the innocent word “book”? It would be an instructive exercise to try to construct more zeugmas based on yet other senses of the word “book”, but we have other goals here, so we will leave that challenge to our readers.

Instead, let’s look at a somewhat more complex zeugma:

When they grew up, neither of those bullies ever had to pay for all the mean things that they did as, and to, younger kids.

Here the trickiness is in the strange, lightning-fast shifting of meaning of “younger kids” as a function of whether it is seen as part of the phrase “things that they did as younger kids” or as part of the phrase “things that they did to younger kids”, since in the first case the
younger kids
are the ex-bullies themselves (or rather, the bullies that they once were), while in the latter case the
younger kids
are their victims.

Although the zeugmas we’ve exhibited above are mostly quite amusing, it’s not for entertainment but for enlightenment that we’ve brought up the topic. And so let’s take a look at some cases that raise more serious issues.

“You are always welcome in my home,” he said in English and all sincerity.

This zeugma is clearly built around the word “in”, and the natural question here is whether we are dealing with
one
sense or
two
senses of the word. In a respectable dictionary, these two meanings would probably have distinct subentries. However, what about the following sentence?

“You are no longer welcome in my home,” he said in anger and all sincerity.

Are the two meanings of “in” here exactly the same? Perhaps — after all, they both apply to the mental states of a single person; but then again perhaps not — after all, one could replace “in anger” by “in an outburst of anger” but certainly one could not
say “in an outburst of sincerity”. So it’s rather tricky. As a matter of fact, it would be impossible to give a definitive judgment on this issue. Indeed, we chose this example precisely because it brings out certain subtle nuances of the concept
in.
How does one recognize those situations that match the English word “in”? To put it another way, how does one recognize in-situations? What do all in-situations have in common, and how do some of them differ from others, and why would it be next to impossible to make a precise and sharp classification of all the types of
in
-situation?

Let’s shift our attention from a preposition to a verb. Does the following sentence strike you as innocuous and perfectly acceptable (
i.e.
, nonzeugmatic), or does it grate on your ears (thus it would be a zeugma)?

I’m going to brush my teeth and my hair.

Are the two types of brushing really just one thing deep down, or are they worlds apart? We might gain perspective on this question by looking at a similar example in another language. In Italian, one might easily and comfortably say:

Voglio lavarmi la faccia e i denti.

(In a fairly literal translation, this says, “I want to wash my face and my teeth.”) The fact that Italian speakers say things this way sheds light on how they perceive the world — namely, it shows that they perceive the act of washing one’s face and the act of brushing one’s teeth as belonging to the same category (both are types of
washing
), and thus they are, in some sense, “the same act”.

On the other hand, to speakers of English, brushing one’s teeth is not a kind of washing (washing usually involves soap of some sort, and most people would hesitate to refer to toothpaste as “soap”, though the two have much in common), so the sentence sounds zeugmatic (that is, its double application of the same word makes us smile). As for French, although occasionally one will hear “se laver les dents” (“to wash one’s teeth”), it is more common to say (and hear) “se brosser les dents” (“to brush one’s teeth”). The latter seems more natural to French speakers than the former. And thus we see that a phrase (“to wash one’s teeth and one’s face”) can be very zeugmatic in one language (English), can have a faintly zeugmatic flavor in another language (French), and can be totally nonzeugmatic in a third language (Italian).

The preceding example shows how a zeugma can reveal a conceptual division that speakers of language A find blatantly obvious, while to speakers of language B it is difficult to spot. For instance, in English, we can say without any sense of oddness:

Sometimes I go to work by car, and other times on foot.

In German or Russian, however, these two forms of locomotion call for different verbs. When one takes a vehicle to arrive at one’s destination, then the verb “fahren” is used in German, whereas when one goes somewhere on foot, then the verb “gehen” is used.
In Russian it’s trickier yet, because not only is there a distinction between
going in a vehicle
and going on foot, but also the choice of verb depends on whether this kind of motion is undertaken frequently or just one time. Thus a completely innocuous-seeming verb in English breaks up into several different verbs in Russian. In other words, what to English speakers seems to be a monolithic concept splits into four distinct concepts to Russian speakers.

Let’s take another very simple sentence in English:

The boy and the dog were eating bread.

This sentence is nonzeugmatic in English; that is, it simply
works
, sounding neither strange nor humorous to the English-speaking ear. On the other hand, it sounds wrong in German, because different verbs apply to animal and human ingestion — “fressen” for the beasts, and “essen” for humans. In other words, German speakers split up what to us anglophones is the monolithic concept of
eating
, breaking it into two varieties, according to the type of creature that is carrying out the act.

These examples might inspire someone to imagine a language (and culture) that has no verb that applies both to men and to women. Thus it would have one verb that would apply to eating acts by
men
and a different one that would apply to eating acts by
women
— say, “to wolf down” for men and “to fox down” for women, as in “Petunia foxed down her sandwich with relish, gusto, and pickles”. Speakers of this hypothetical language would find it jolting to learn that in English one can say, “My husband and I enjoy eating the same things” or “A girl and a boy were walking down the sidewalk.” To them, such sentences would sound nonsensical. A language like this may strike you as ludicrous, but many languages do make just such gender-based lexical distinctions.

For instance, in French there is a clear-cut distinction between enjoyment partaken of by men and enjoyment partaken of by women, which shows up in, among other venues, the standard adjective meaning “happy”: whereas a joyous man or boy will be “heureux”, a joyous woman or girl will be “heureuse”. And thus, a
curieux
French male might well wonder what it feels like to be
heureuse
— but he would do so in vain! A man simply cannot be
heureuse
! In like manner, a
curieuse
French woman might wonder what it feels like to be
heureux
— but her efforts, no matter how valiant, would be doomed to failure. A Venusian might as well try to imagine what it feels like to be Martian!

Does all this sound far-fetched to you? Well, consider that there is a famous Russian poem centered on what the poet, a man named Il’ya L’vovich Selvinsky, considered a very strange fact: namely, that every act of his lover — every single one of the mundane verbs that described her actions — was graced, when in the past tense, by a feminine ending (often the syllables or bisyllables “la”, “ala”, or “yala”). The poet describes various completely ordinary actions on her part (walking, eating, etc.), and then expresses wonderment at his own feeling of disorientation, since he, being a male,
has never once performed a single one of these “uniquely feminine” acts, nor experienced a single one of these “uniquely feminine” sensations, and, alas, will never be able to do so. In making such observations, is Selvinsky expressing something deep, or is he merely playing with words?

One can easily enough imagine a language that, with a panoply of verbs, distinguishes between a vast number of different ways of eating — the eating of a famished boy, of a high-society lady, of a pig, a horse, a rabbit, a shark, a catfish, an eagle, a hummingbird, and so forth and so on. Such a fine-grained breakup of a concept that seems to
us
completely monolithic is perfectly imaginable, because we understand that there are genuine differences between these creatures’ ways of ingesting food (indeed, if there weren’t any, we would not have written “genuine differences”). Each language has the right and the responsibility to decide where it wishes to draw distinctions in the zone of semantic space that includes all of these distinct activities. After all, there are not, on earth (and never have been, and never will be) two creatures that eat in an exactly identical fashion, nor even two different moments in which a single creature eats in exactly the same manner, down to the tiniest detail.

Every act is unique, and yet there are resemblances between certain acts, and it is precisely these resemblances that give a language the opportunity to describe them all by the same label; and when a language chooses to do so, that fact creates “families” of actions. This is a subtle challenge to which every language reacts in its own fashion, but once this has been done, each group of people who share a common native language accepts as completely natural and self-evident the specific breakdown of concepts handed to them by their language. On the other hand, the conceptual distinctions that are part and parcel of
other
languages may strike them as artificial, pointlessly finicky, even incomprehensible or stupid, unless they find some interest in the subtleties of such distinctions, which may then make them see their own set of concepts in a fresh light.

The verb “to play” affords us a delightful sampler of zeugmas, or else, depending on a person’s native language and on their own personal way of perceiving the actions involved, nonzeugmas. For example:

Edmond plays basketball and soccer.

This sentence, on first sight, might seem about as natural as they come, and very far from zeugmaticity, and yet the two activities involved, although they both belong to the category of
sports
, are different in numerous ways from each other. For instance, one involves a ball that is primarily in contact with the feet (and on occasion with the head), while the other involves a ball that is primarily in contact with the hands (and virtually never with the head). Certain speakers of English might therefore hear a trace of strangeness, albeit only very slight, in the application of the same verb to two rather disparate activities.

If
essen
(which is what people do when they eat food) and
fressen
(which is what, say, pigs and rabbits do with their food) are seen by German speakers as activities that belong to two different categories, then there is nothing to keep us from imagining a language in which one would say:

Edmondus snuoiqs basketballum pluss iggfruds soccerum.

The speakers of this hypothetical language would see the actions of basketball players — or rather, of basketball
snuoiqers
— as being just as different from the actions of soccer
igg fruders
as the sounds “snuoiq” and “iggfrud” are different from each other.

If this example’s zeugmaticity seems too weak, then we can try another avenue of approach to the same issue:

Sylvia plays tennis, Monopoly, and violin.

This sentence involves a musical instrument and two types of game that are much more different from each other than are basketball and soccer. If one tried to measure the distances between these three concepts by asking people to estimate them, it’s likely that most people would place
violin
quite a long ways from
tennis
and
Monopoly
, and those two games, though not extremely near each other, would be much closer than either of them is to
violin.
And finally, not too surprisingly, this matches the collective choice of Italian speakers, who would translate the above sentence as follows:

Sylvia
gioca
al tennis e a Monopoly, e
suona
il violino.

It would be unthinkable, in Italian, for anyone to
play
(in the sense of
giocare)
a musical instrument; the mere suggestion is enough to make an Italian smile. The kind of scene that such a phrase would conjure up is that of people playing catch with a Stradivarius, for instance. While it is natural for English and French speakers to see violin-playing as belonging to the same category as soccer-playing and basketball-playing, the idea would seem downright silly to Italian speakers.

In French, the verb
jouer
is used both for musical instruments and for sports, but it is followed by different prepositions in the two cases. Thus one plays
at
a sport but one plays
of
a musical instrument. Does this syntactic convention split the concept of
jouer
into two quite clear and distinct sub-meanings? In English, there is no similar syntactic convention that would create a mental division of the verb “to play” into two separate pieces; rather, it simply feels monolithic.