Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (6 page)

One might naturally wonder how a Chinese speaker would ask a more generic question, such as “How many instruments does Baofen play?” But the best translations of this perfectly natural English sentence elegantly bypass the problem by making use of very broad verbs such as
(“xuéxí”) or
(“huì”), which mean, respectively,
“to study” and “to be able; to know”, and which have no particular connection with music. In short, there is no general verb in Mandarin that corresponds to the
musical
notion of playing, even though to us English speakers the concept seems totally logical, even inevitable; but the fact is that speakers of Chinese have no awareness of this lacuna in their lexicon, no matter how blatant it might seem to us.

Well, all right, then. But what about playing games and sports — surely there is just one verb in Chinese for this monolithic concept? To begin with, one does not, in Mandarin, play board games and sports with the same verb. For chess, one engages in the activity of
(“xià”), which one does not do with any kind of ball. And for a sport that uses a ball, it all depends on the kind of ball involved. For basketball, it’s
(“dâ”), the verb that applies to playing a drum (the connection may seem a bit strained to a non-Chinese), whereas for soccer it’s
(“tī”), which means “to kick”. Thus one might say, “I prefer kicking soccer to beating basketball.” Once again we see that in a domain that strikes an English speaker as monolithic — everything is
played
, and that’s all there is to it! — distinctions are not just rife but necessary in Chinese.

For English speakers, despite our use of the single verb “to play”, it’s not terribly hard to see that this verb conflates two activities that are quite different — namely, making rhythmic noises and having fun — and that the conceptual union thus created is not inevitable, and might even be seen as being rather arbitrary. On the other hand,
within
each of these two domains, it’s harder to see a lack of natural unity. If someone were to ask us if
playing dolls, playing chess
, and
playing soccer
are all really “the same activity”, we could of course point out differences, but to focus on such fine distinctions would seem quite nitpicky. And when we learn that in Mandarin,
playing soccer
and
playing basketball
require different verbs, it is likely to strike us as really overdoing things,
rather as if some exotic tongue insisted on using two different verbs to say “to drink”, depending on whether it involved drinking
white
wine or
red
wine. But then again, this is an important distinction for wine-lovers, so it’s conceivable that some of them would very much like the idea of having two such verbs.

Our brief excursion to Zeugmaland will come to a climax in the following bold prediction:

You will enjoy this zeugma as much as a piece of chocolate or of music.

This sentence has a couple of zeugmatic aspects. Firstly, it plays on two senses of the noun “piece”. In some readers recognition of this contrast will evoke a smile, even though there’s no denying that both usages of the word are completely standard. Secondly, it plays on three senses of the verb “enjoy” — one involving a gustatory experience, another involving an auditory experience, and yet another involving the savoring of a linguistic subtlety. Each reader will of course have a personal feeling for how large the distinction between these three senses of the word is.

Aside from making us smile, zeugmas offer us the chance to reflect on the hidden structure behind the scenes of a word or phrase — that is, on the concept associated with the lexical item, or more precisely, on the
set of concepts
associated with it — and since most words could potentially be used to form a zeugma (including very simple-seeming words such as “go”, as we saw above in the discussion of German and Russian), the phenomenon necessarily increases our sensitivity to the miracle of the human brain’s ability to spontaneously assign just about anything it encounters to some previously known category. After all, despite the inevitable and undefinable blurriness of the “edges” of each one of our categories, and despite the enormous number of categories, our brains manage to carry out such assignments in a tiny fraction of a second and in a manner of which we are totally unaware.