![]() ![]() ![]() : 88 Note the ambiguity of the Hebrew lexical item גמור gamúr: it means both "complete" and "finished". Some paraprosdokians do not only change the meaning of an early phrase, as in garden-path sentence, but they also play on the double meaning of a particular word, creating a form of syllepsis or antanaclasis (a type of pun).įor example, in response to the question "how are you two?", a Modern Hebrew speaker can say בסדר גמור היא בסדר, אני גמור ( be-séder gamúr i be-séder, aní gamúr), literally "in-order complete she in-order, I complete", i.e., "We are very good. Ĭanadian linguist and etymology author William Gordon Casselman argued that, while the word is now in wide circulation, "paraprosdokian" (or "paraprosdokia") is not a term of classical (or medieval) Greek or Latin rhetoric, but a late 20th-century neologism, citing the fact that the word does not yet appear in the Oxford English Dictionary as evidence of its late coinage he subsequently conceded that the term had been used as far back as 1896, but nonetheless repeated his assertion that it is "an oafish monstrosity with a spurious claim upon ancient authority". ![]() The noun "prosdokia" occurs with the preposition "para" in Greek rhetorical writers of the 1st century BCE and the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, with the meaning "contrary to expectation" or "unexpectedly." These four sources are cited under "prosdokia" in Liddell-Scott-Jones, Greek Lexicon. "Paraprosdokian" comes from the Greek " παρά", meaning "against", and " προσδοκία", meaning "expectation". For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists such as Groucho Marx. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax. A paraprosdokian ( / p ær ə p r ɒ s ˈ d oʊ k i ə n/) is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence, phrase, or larger discourse is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. ![]()
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