Definition:
(1) One word used in two contrasting (and often comic) senses. (2) Homonymic pun. See also:
Etymology:
From the Greek, "reflection, bending, breaking against"Examples and Observations:
- "If you don’t look good, we don’t look good."
(Vidal Sassoon advertising slogan) - "If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm."
(Vince Lombardi) - "The modern sensibility prefers the mechanics of a rhetorical effect to be hidden from view; anything which smacks of contrivance or artifice, any construction which leaves the scaffolding in place, is regarded with some suspicion. . . . In other words, the more obvious the pun to the reader (regardless of what feats of ingenuity went into its fabrication), the less pleasure there is to be derived from it. This is perhaps why antanaclasis, the figure in which a word occurs and is then repeated in a different sense, has never been rehabilitated . . .; the repetition flags the effects, and it shades from being clever into being clever-clever. This hasn't always been the case. In the Renaissance, obviousness was no impediment to joy: quite the opposite, in fact."
(Sophie Read, "Puns: Serious Wordplay," in Sylvia Adamson et al., Renaissance Figures of Speech. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008) - "For every woman growing anxious about thinning hair, there are thousands growing it back."
(advertisement for Rogaine) - "Kings worry about a receding heir line."
- "People on the go . . . go for Coke."
(advertisement for Coca Cola) - "Death, tho I see him not, is near
And grudges me my eightieth year.
Now I would give him all these last
For one that fifty have run past.
Ah! He strikes all things, all alike,
But bargains: those he will not strike."
(Walter Savage Landor, "Age") - "And there's bars on the corners and bars on the heart."
(Tim McGraw, "Where The Green Grass Grows")
Pronunciation: an-tan-ACK-la-sis
Also Known As: pun, paronomasia
