zoonosis

Pronounced: zoh-AHN-uh-sis (alt: zoh-uh-NOH-sis)

Notes: I’ve probably heard this word; I just don’t remember hearing it

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Yesterday’s word

The word syllepsis means “the use of a word in the same grammatical relation to two different adjacent words in the context with one literal and the other metaphorical in sense”

First usage

Our word came into English in the late 1500s

Background / Comments

Here is an example of a syllepsis taken from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens: he wrote that one of his characters “went straight home, in a flood of tears and a sedan chair”. When I read that, it sounded a lot like a recent entry. It does seem to me to be similar to zeugma, which I did last month. However, the search revealed that I also used zeugma as my word eight months earlier (oops; my apologies, gentle reader). From my research, a syllepsis can refer to such cases in which there is a problem with verb/subject agreement. In the syllepsis “She exercises to keep healthy and I to lose weight.”, the word “exercises” agrees with “she” but does not agree with “I”. Our word came from the Greek word syllēpsis, which came from syllambanien (to gather together).