April A to Z 2015, Mateys!

I know April A to Z is a ways off yet, but I am thinking about it already . . .

 

. . . I don’t want a Team and don’t want to be a Minion, but wouldn’t mind having a crew . . .

 

. . . a KREWE would be even better! Click “Continue Reading” for info.

Taking a Breather, and Happy Six-Month Blogiversary to The Monster

Thank you, again, to everyone who stopped by during A to Z and read my posts. Thanks, especially, for the comments. Comments are my favorite form of feedback, but I am also a big fan of likes, follows, and votes 🙂 I almost withdrew from the challenge the week before it started because I didn’t have enough content ready to go. I’m so glad I didn’t do that.

I said 30 days ago that April would be a transitional month. It has been, and we’re through it. It’s been hectic, and I’ve had to let a lot of administrative things go to keep up. I must shave off some time to take care of those things in May. Administration, even of a small social media network, is a problem. Administration requires you to be absent from public social media, but it has to be done to keep things organized and running.

I’m rethinking my quality v. consistency plan for The Writing Catalog. The A to Z Challenge has proven to me that a blog about writing is a good idea, but I have so many other responsibilities, I can’t really do the writing justice more than a couple of times of week, at best.

A to Z Day 26: Zeugma

Click for A-Z blog list.

Zeugma is a fun word to say, and a fairly simple concept, but the explanation is a bit complicated, so I’m borrowing one more definition from Dr. L. Kip Wheeler of Carson-Newman University.

ZEUGMA (Greek “yoking” or “bonding”): Artfully using a single verb to refer to two different objects in an ungrammatical but striking way, or artfully using an adjective to refer to two separate nouns, even though the adjective would logically only be appropriate for one of the two. For instance, in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Fluellen cries, “Kill the boys and the luggage.” (The verb kill normally wouldn’t be applied to luggage, so it counts a zeugma.) If the resulting grammatical construction changes the verb’s initial meaning but is still grammatically correct, the zeugma is sometimes called syllepsis–though in actual practice, most critics use the general term zeugma to include both the grammatical and ungrammatical types interchangeably. Examples of these syllepses and zeugmas abound–particulary in seventeenth-century literature:

“If we don’t hang together, we shall hang separately!” (Ben Franklin).
“The queen of England sometimes takes advice in that chamber, and sometimes tea.”
“. . . losing her heart or her necklace at the ball.” (Alexander Pope).