Can One Verb Do Two Jobs at Once? It Can, and It Is Usually a Joke

The figure occurs when one word, usually a verb, is made to govern two or more others that each require a different sense of it. The reader takes the word literally the first time and has to shift to a figurative reading for the second, and that small forced adjustment is what produces the effect. Because the word is stated once rather than twice, the construction is compressed, and because the two senses are yoked together by force, the result draws attention to itself in a way that repeating the word would not.

The construction is recognisable once the pattern is clear:

• •One governing word, stated once only
• •Two or more items depending on it
• •Each item requiring a different sense of that word
• •One sense usually literal and the other figurative
• •The reader supplying the shift, which is where the effect lives
• •The gap between senses determining how comic the result is

A small number of instances have carried the device in popular memory. Alexander Pope has a heroine who may stain her honour or her new brocade, and elsewhere a queen who takes counsel and takes tea. Charles Dickens has a character leave in a flood of tears and a sedan chair. Groucho Marx accounts for the morning by saying he shot an elephant in his pyjamas, which works by a different ambiguity and is frequently misfiled as this device. The pattern in the genuine cases is that the two senses are wide apart and the trivial one comes second, which is what makes the line land.

The construction depends on one word carrying two senses, and no two languages divide senses the same way, so a line built on it almost never survives translation intact. A translator faces a choice between reproducing the meaning and losing the joke, reproducing the structure with a different pair of senses that happen to work in the target language, or inventing a comparable effect somewhere nearby to compensate. All three are used, and the third is standard practice in literary translation and is invisible to a reader comparing only one passage. It is also why humour in translation is studied as a distinct problem rather than as a special case of accuracy.

Classification of the figure is a genuine mess and the reader should know it before consulting any two sources. Ancient and Renaissance rhetoric distinguished several closely related constructions, separating cases where the governing word fits both items grammatically but not semantically, cases where it fits one grammatically and not the other, and cases where a word is omitted entirely and supplied from elsewhere. The names assigned to those cases differ between authorities and have been swapped repeatedly, so a construction called one thing in one handbook is called another in the next. Modern usage has largely collapsed the distinctions, which is convenient and loses information.

One word governing two others in different senses forces the reader to shift between a literal and a figurative reading, and that shift is the whole effect, which is why the device draws attention where repeating the word would not. The examples that survive place the wide senses far apart with the trivial one second. The classical terms for the related constructions have been swapped so often that no two handbooks agree.