In their song “The Old Apartment,” The Barenaked Ladies sang, “crooked landing / crooked landlord / narrow laneway filled with crooks.” “Crooked” there is an example of a polyseme, or one word that has multiple meanings. Similar to this is the syllepsis, wherein one word is applied to other words in different senses (e.g. Alanis Morissette: “You held your breath and the door for me”). This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Polysemes and Syllepsis”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, it’s Matt from Kalamazoo.
Hi, Matt. Welcome to the program.
Hi, Matt.
How can we help you today?
Well, I have a question.
One of my favorite bands is the Barenaked Ladies, and they’re pretty well known for their witty lyrics.
And in several of their songs, they use a bit of wordplay, where they use homonyms in the same sentence.
So, for example, broken to the old apartment, 42 steps from the street.
Here it is, crooked landing, crooked landlord, narrow laneway filled with crooks.
This is where we used to live.
Or another example, I wax poetic as you’re waxing your legs.
So you’ve got crooked in one little bit there, one little part of the lyrics, where crooked has two different meanings, and then you’ve got waxing in another part where waxing kind of has two different meanings, right?
Right. Actually, they use it three times in the first example.
So it’s crooked landing, crooked landlord, narrow laneway filled with crooks.
So I guess you could say that three times.
Yeah, and so one time years ago, I was thumbing through my dictionary, and I came across the name of this type of wordplay, and I’ve forgotten it.
And all I can remember is that it rhymes with the word ellipses, I think, and I was hoping you could tell me what it was in that type of wordplay.
But I want to mention something.
You called them homonyms.
I don’t think that we’re quite talking about homonyms here.
Right. Yeah, I was kind of wavering on that myself.
Okay, yeah. The technical term might be polysemes, which means a word that has more than one meaning, but they are the same word.
Right.
It’s just one word with multiple meanings rather than different words with the same spelling, which is what a homonym is.
Right.
I know that sounds a little awkward, but because of the weird etymological history of English, we have numerous words that look identical but are not the same word.
They’re completely unrelated even though they have the same spelling, and that is a true homonym.
Yeah, and I think that the word that you’re thinking of that sounds like an ellipsis is probably celepsis.
Does that sound right?
S-Y-L-L-E-P-S-I-S, celepsis.
Okay.
And that is where one word is applied to other words in different senses.
Like you might say, John and his driver’s license expired last week.
Or she left in a huff and yellow cab.
That kind of thing.
Right.
If you Google that word, that’s S-Y-L-L-E-P-S-I-S, you will find a zillion of these because people love collecting these because some of them are hilarious.
Right, right.
I think I’d be in that group.
Cool?
Yeah, I think so.
All right.
Thanks for calling.
Hey, thanks, guys.
Appreciate it.
All right, bye-bye.
