The Rolling Stones and their zeugmoids
Laurence Horn
laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Jul 13 13:49:15 UTC 2012
Indeed. I've come across citings of this line as an echt zeugma in a couple of academic novels. Most recently it pops up in Stephen King's 11/22/63 (p. 426), when Jake, the time traveler hero from 2011 is back in the Texas of the 1950s (his goal is, of course, to unassassinate JFK on the eponymous date) and is overheard singing to himself, raising suspicions in the mind of the overhearer Sadie, even after Jake passes the critical lines off as something he must have heard on the radio:
Jake: "Honky Tonk Women"? That's what I'd been singing. A song that wouldn't be recorded for another seven or eight years, by a group that wouldn't even have an American hit for another three…How could been so dumb?
Sadie: "'She blew my nose and then she blew my mind' On the _radio_? The FCC would shut down a station that played something like that!"
LH
On Jul 13, 2012, at 1:58 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
> The Rolling Stones lyric "She blew my nose and then she blew my mind"
> (from "Honky Tonk Women") has come up here a couple of times. For my
> latest Word Routes column, I talk about that line and other
> "zeugmoids" (as Arnold Zwicky calls them) from the pen of Mick and
> Keith.
>
> http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/in-praise-of-the-rolling-stones-and-their-zeugmoids/
>
> --bgz
>
> --
> Ben Zimmer
> http://benzimmer.com/
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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