Zeitgeist [tsyt-gyst] The German word for ‘time-spirit’, more often translated as ‘spirit of the age’. It usually refers to the prevailing mood or attitude of a given period.

zeugma [zewg-mă] A *figure of speech by which one word refers to two others in the same sentence. Literally a ‘yoking’, zeugma may be achieved by a verb or preposition with two objects, as in the final line of Shakespeare’s 128th sonnet:

Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.

Or it may employ a verb with two subjects, as in the opening of his 55th sonnet:

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

However, the term is frequently used as a synonym for *syllepsis—a special kind of zeugma in which the yoking term agrees grammatically with only one of the terms to which it is applied, or refers to each in a different sense. In the confusion surrounding these two terms, some rhetoricians have reserved ‘zeugma’ for the ungrammatical sense of syllepsis. Adjective: zeugmatic.