[Milton-L] Thanks for Help with terminology sought

[Harold Skulsky]

In the hyperbaton exemplified by  “Your foul silence corrupts, and
your impure breath" the verb “corrupts” is transposed so as to
separate the two coordinated subjects. The effect is to make “and your
impure breath” register on the hearer as an afterthought, or
epiphrase; the speaker pretends to be freely improvising (of course he
is doing nothing of the sort). In short the psychologically informative
description of Professor Duran's specimen is “hyperbaton effected by
epiphrasis.” 

But there’s a crucial complication. What we have here is more than a
syntactic manoeuver (figura verborum). Seen at closer quarters, it’s a
semantic figure (figura sententiarum)—in fact, a play of wit:
“corrupts” goes in one (literal) sense with “impure breath”
and in quite a different (figurative) sense with “foul silence.” The
tactical effect of the afterthought is an unexpected coup de
grâce—this person (come to think of it) is as contaminating
physically as he (she?) is morally. (For the semantic shift, compare
Pope’s satirical comment on the Queen who “sometimes counsel
takes—and sometimes tea.”) 

The appropriate classical description for the semantic manoeuver is
(see Alexander Rhetor 2.17) is zeugma; since the displaced term comes in
the middle, the syntactic part of the performance would justify using
the Diomedes’ and Asconius’ term mesozeugma (meso- = “in the
middle”). Unfortunately, Diomedes and Asconius are nearly forgotten
(though not by me, for better or worse), and the usual (early modern)
source for this term is the slipshod Puttenham, who demotes mesozeugma
to a mere synonym of “hyperbaton.”

What to do? I heartily concur with Professor Green’s cautionary
remark that classical terminology “is most useful when it points us
toward patterns that are most worth discussing, and often the most
interesting uses of language simultaneously involve several tropes or
figures.” In the spirit of that remark, I vote for consigning
“mesozeugma” to the oblivion to which Puttenham has condemned it,
and describing Professor Duran’s specimen as a combination of
hyperbaton, epiphrasis, and zeugma.