It's Magic!
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 at 12:22PM
Figaro

From Ask Figaro:

 Dear Figaro,
In The Last Unicorn, Peter Beagle described the unicorn as having amarathine eyes. This uses both meanings of “amarathine” simultaneously (undying and a purple color) without it being a pun or zeugma. Is there a word for this literary device?
Teek

Dear Teek,
It is indeed a kind of pun called the antanaclasis (an-ta-NA-cla-sis), or double entendre. Not the joking, play-on-words kind of pun, the antanaclasis strikes a rhetorical chord, causing the word to vibrate with its double meaning — a bicorn, if you will.
Fig.

Article originally appeared on Figures of Speech (http://inpraiseofargument.com/).
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