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WORD OF THE DAY..........courtesy of Dictionary.com
ifyoucantfixit:
assoil \uh-SOIL\, verb:
1. To absolve; acquit; pardon.
2. To atone for.
Come up, wives, offer of your yarn! See, I enter your name here in my roll; you shall enter into heaven's bliss; I assoil you by mine high power, you that will make offerings, as clear and clean as when you were born — (lo sirs, thus I preach).
-- Bennett Cerf, An Anthology of Famous British Stories
"Go, and assoil thy living patient: the dead are past thy cares." — " I go," said the Monk of Montcalm, " and Heaven grant that I may shed around his death-hour, that peace which, I fear me, bloody prelate, will be denied to thine!"
-- Charles Robert Maturin, The Albigenses
Assoil is derived from the same root as the similar word absolve. However, assoil came into English through the Middle French word asoiler rather than directly from Latin like the word absolve.
Front-Ranger:
It's Janice's birthday today. Here's one of her delightful vocabulary posts.
--- Quote from: ifyoucantfixit on October 12, 2012, 05:21:05 pm ---
zeugma \ZOOG-muh\, noun:
The use of a word to modify or govern two or more words when it is appropriate to only one of them or is appropriate to each but in a different way, as in to wage war and peace or On his fishing trip, he caught three trout and a cold.
Of course, the zeugma is not an eighteenth-century invention, but it was not handled before then with such neatness and consciousness, and had not the same air of being the normal process of thought.
-- William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
If we take "We will be proud of course the air will be" as a strong syntactical unit, a complete sentence, the parallelism of "we will be" and "the air will be" draws both these auxiliary phrases toward the yoke (or zeugma, in rhetorical parlance) of the main verb phrase.
-- Cary Nelson, Ed Folsom, W. S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry
Zeugma stems from the Greek word of the same spelling which meant "a yoking."
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