Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Zeugma Avoidance -- a Canon of Construction:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_11_02-2008_11_08.shtml#1226090374
Rereading D.C. v. Heller, I was struck by the following passage (one
paragraph break added):
The phrase "bear Arms" also had at the time of the founding an
idiomatic meaning that was significantly different from its natural
meaning: "to serve as a soldier, do military service, fight" or "to
wage war." ....
[But] the meaning of "bear arms" that petitioners and Justice
Stevens propose is not even the (sometimes) idiomatic meaning.
Rather, they manufacture a hybrid definition, whereby "bear arms"
connotes the actual carrying of arms (and therefore is not really
an idiom) but only in the service of an organized militia. No
dictionary has ever adopted that definition, and we have been
apprised of no source that indicates that it carried that meaning
at the time of the founding. But it is easy to see why petitioners
and the dissent are driven to the hybrid definition. Giving "bear
Arms" its idiomatic meaning would cause the protected right to
consist of the right to be a soldier or to wage war--an absurdity
that no commentator has ever endorsed.
Worse still, the phrase "keep and bear Arms" would be incoherent.
The word "Arms" would have two different meanings at once:
"weapons" (as the object of "keep") and (as the object of "bear")
one-half of an idiom. It would be rather like saying "He filled and
kicked the bucket" to mean "He filled the bucket and died."
Grotesque.
That there's a [1]zeugma you're talking about, Mr. Justice: "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." Why didn't you just say so?
I should note that the word "zeugma" appears in Westlaw's Allcases
database 20 times -- all of them either in the name Zeugma Corp. or
the title of Libert H. Boeynaems, [2]Bishop of Zeugma (and, yes, there
is likely a connection to the word, but rather remote).
References
1. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/zeugma
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libert_H._Boeynaems
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