Man’s Best Friend Paraprosdokian

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Groucho Marx had A Way with Words.

He was an expert at turning a particular kind of phrase, like this one.

I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.

Now, what makes these sentences funny, of course,

Is that the speaker takes you down one mental path

And then suddenly makes a sharp turn

And takes you someplace you never expected to go.

Love those.

Well, it turns out there’s a word for this.

It’s a term of rhetoric, and it’s paraprosdokian.

Paraprosdokian.

Yes, let me spell that.

P-A-R-A-P-R-O-S-D-O-K-I-A-N.

This isn’t one of the more common terms of rhetoric, I guess.

No, no, but it’s really handy to have this word if you want to find a whole lot of paraprosdokians on the Internet.

It’s from two Greek words that mean beyond or beside expectation,

And it’s been a staple of comedy ever since antiquity.

And now people like Stephen Colbert use it all the time.

Does it have to be funny, though?

I mean, it often is, and the best examples are,

But it could just be unexpected turn of phrase, right?

Yeah, yeah.

That’s just straightforward, right?

Yeah, do you have any favorites yourself?

You know, I do have one, now that you mention it.

And it’s incredibly short, and I think it is a paraprostokian.

Decades ago, when Ronald Reagan was present,

Rich Little was famous for imitating Ronald Reagan, right?

And Reagan had this particular speech habit that he would imitate.

And so one of his gags was he’d do this fake interview thing and somebody would say, Mr. President, how are you feeling today?

And he would go, well.

And then he would just stop because Reagan always said, well, I want to tell you about the Russians and the missiles.

Right?

Because you’d expect him to go on.

But actually, instead of saying well as a sentence marker, he was saying well as an adverb, meaning I’m well.

And it was just perfect, perfect right turn.

You’re like, wait a second.

Oh, oh, it just takes you a second to realize he’s not going to follow that up.

That is the answer, and it’s perfectly coherent.

That’s it.

I suppose that works.

Yeah.

But you’ve got more.

I see a big stack of papers there.

I do, and I’ll share some more of them later in the show, but let me just leave you with this one.

Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

Boy, don’t I know that one.

Well, this is the place to talk about language, about paraphrosedokians, or prose, or poetry, or words and where they come from.

Call us 1-877-929-9673, or you can email us words@waywordradio.org.