If it wasn’t for disappointment I wouldn’t have any appointments…
-They Might Be Giants
Zeugma is too close to smegma for comfort
Is this one? From I Cover the Waterfront:
“I see the horizon, the great unknown.
My heart has an ache it’s as heavy as stone.
Will the dawn coming on make it light?”
From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain:
“They tugged and tore at each other’s hair and clothes, punched and scratched each other’s nose, and covered themselves with dust and glory.”
“She was turned on by the television, and vice-versa.”
(I heard this first as patter from Ian Anderson on a recording of a Jethro Tull concert in Carnegie Hall, circa 1970, but I’m sure he didn’t invent it.)
From the musical Hamilton:
“‘We hold these truths to be self-evident
That all men are created equal.’
And when I meet Thomas Jefferson
I’m ‘a compel him to include women in the sequel!”
“Outside a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside a dog it’s too dark to read.”
The opening song of Hamilton has the line “we fought with him!” sung by the actors who portray people who fought along side Hamilton during the Revolutionary War, and also people who opposed his policies while they were in Washington’s Cabinet.
“The childhood of a hood that was raised in the hood: cops said
‘Put your hands in the hot sky,’
threw my hands down on the hot hood”
— Chino XL
More from the same song (wordsmith):
“Hyphen, dot, dot, semicolon, leave you semi-swollen
Question mark, you pregnant? Oh, you’re not. I love you, period.”
(“Period” has three meanings: punctuation, menstruation, and finality/emphasis.)
Just listening to Bob Dylan’s strange, but appealing new album “Shadow Kingdom”, and “Queen Jane Approximately” comes up. How could I have forgotten this line?
Now, when all the clowns that you have commissioned
Have died in battle or in vain
“It’s too bad that whole families have to be torn apart by something as simple as wild dogs.”
— Jack Handey
It took me a minute to get this sentence from the book I’m currently reading:
“I should have realized it was a hope so vain that Carly Simon could have written a famously enigmatic song about it.”
From a recent New York Times article:
Sherry-Lehmann, a longtime purveyor of luxury wines, owes New York State $2.8 million in unpaid sales taxes — and its customers an explanation.
Replying to the Carly Simon post…
Wouldn’t it be apropos if the guy she sings about was actually named…
…Seauveign?
My all-time favorite is from a T. Kingfisher novel, describing a trip by horseback:
The Shawshank Redemption had, “I’d like to think that the last thing that went through his head, other than that bullet, was to wonder…”
So time flew like a lead balloon?
Thats more of a chaismus, which is a crossing (hence the name) or inversion. The best example of that is Tom Wait’s “I’d rather have a bottle on front of me than a frontal lobotomy”, which more or less mic dropped the whole concept.
It’s dated, but mnemonic example for zuegma has always been “She stained her honor and her prom dress”, which is how the term was taught to me.
“I was too fucking busy, and vice versa.”
I don’t know if it was Waits or someone else who upped it with, “I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me than a prefrontal lobotomy.”