Pylimitics

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” (Groucho Marx)

“We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” (Benjamin Franklin)

Those are examples of “antanaclasis,” which is repeating a word (or a phrase), and using it in a different sense the second time. The word comes from Latin, but originated in a Greek word for reflection or echo. The rhetorical technique was used even in ancient Greek — which makes sense, since the original study of rhetoric itself comes from ancient Greece. 

Antanaclasis entered English in the 1500s, and was defined by Henry Peacham in his 1577 Garden of Eloquence: “Antanaclasis, when we repeate one worde that hath two signifycations, and one of them contrary, or at the leaste vnlike to the other.” 

Samuel Johnson redefined it in his “Dictionary of the English Language” two centuries later, and included an example: “Antanaclasis,..when the same word is repeated in a different, if not in a contrary signification; as ‘In thy youth learn some craft, that in thy old age thou mayest get thy living without craft.’”

We still enjoy antanaclases, mostly for humor, which is the way it’s been for a couple thousand years. But the word itself, although it was never widely used, is getting rarer and rarer. A champion antanaclasis in English, of course, is this: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” (That is, bison from the city in upstate New York who are intimidated by other bison from the same city, proceed to intimidate still other bison that are also from Buffalo, NY.) That’s way better than the old ad for Felix cat food: “Cats like Felix like Felix.” 

The antanaclasis gold medal probably goes to Shakespeare. In this passage, Hamlet uses the word “fine” in FOUR different ways (there are only three meanings for “buffalo”). There’s an antanaclasis in there with “recovery”, too:

“There’s another. Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be in ’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the fine of his fines and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will his vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box, and must the inheritor himself have no more, ha?”