Synzeugma (sin-zoog’-ma): That kind of zeugma in which a verb joins (and governs) two phrases by coming between them. A synonym for mesozeugma.
The night was fading and so were my hopes. It had been a long moonless night. It held the final exam for my patience. I’d passed my patience exam, pacing up and down the dock, peering into the shadowed parking lot, waiting for the headlights telling me she was there at last—like she had promised me for the tenth time. The dock had become my night-time hangout, like a bar—a bar without other people or booze, or anything but a wooden floor.
I was sick of this crap. She was the accountant for the business where I worked—her husband’s business—“Oinkies Spicy Pork Rinds.” They were the most disgusting thing ever put in a plastic bag. The logo was a pig with flames coming out of its mouth igniting a pork rind. Strangely enough, though, people bought and ate “Oinkies.” I was surprised that more of them weren’t hospitalized. My job at “Oinkies” was to tend the cooking cauldrons, where floppy pig fat was transformed into spicy crispy pork rinds. Me and Barbara, the boss’s wife, started our affair in the bagging shed, which was fully automated—there were no other employees there. We would take off our clothes, shut down the machinery and hop into the pork rind hopper. We’d squirm into the warm oily rinds and have sex. Afterwards, we’d be covered by an attractive cooking oil sheen and also, smell faintly of pork rinds. Her husband told us he was getting reports of crushed rinds and wanted me to more closely monitor the packing. When he told us that, Barbara and I smirked and almost laughed. We were crushing the rinds!
Anyway, there I was on the dock with my Chris-Craft moored and ready to go down the coast and board a love boat to Mexico. Barbara was supposed to rob the safe—it had close to a half-million packed in it. That would go pretty far in Mexico. The birds were starting to sing their morning songs when I saw Barbara’s Mercedes pull into the lot. My dream come true! My ticket to paradise! Barbara pulled up and got out of the car carrying a really big suitcase. Definitely filled with lots of cash! We hurried down the ramp, jumped onto my boat, and took off for San Diego. As we sped along, Barbara tearfully told me she had made her husband into a giant pork rind. She had pushed him into the hot oil vat. I thought about it for a couple of minutes and then pushed Barbara overboard. After what she had done, she was excess baggage. I could hear her screaming and splashing as I hit full throttle and headed down the coast. I was humming the theme song to “Love Boat” as I pulled up to the dock in San Diego, tied up, and lifted the heavy suitcase out of the boat. I opened the suitcase on the dock. It was filled with pork rinds and a bag of sand.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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