Is this a zeugma that I see before me? No. And I don’t think it is a syllepsis either. But perhaps one of my erudite band of readers can tell me just what is going on, syntactically, in the dedication plaque, pictured above, attached to Medley Footbridge, also known as Rainbow Bridge, which crosses in River Thames near Binsey.

To digress, it was not until I Googled to check the name of the bridge that I found the plaque has carried a spelling error since being put in place in 1865. Though I have looked at it hundreds of times over the years, I had never noticed the ‘c’ missing from ‘subsription’. Wikipedia says this has led some people to call it by a third name, Subscription Bridge.

My interest has always been caught by the clever use of language that gives an ‘of’ applied both to the exertion of Henry Grant Esquire and to his shrievalty.

All last week, The Times carried letters about zeugmas and the closely associated device, syllepsis. Dickens’s “Mr Pickwick took his hat and his leave” is an example of the latter. As you see, it makes sense. Shakespeare’s “Kill the boys and the luggage” is a zeugma which, as Michael Grosvenor Myer pointed out, involves the use of a verb or preposition to govern two objects to only one of which it properly applies.

The distinction was clearly not noted by The Times’s sub-editors who later permitted, as a supposed zeugma, the drawing of a cork, nude or conclusion.

My favourite letter was from Geoff Buckley on Saturday: “All this discussion of zeugma and syllepsis is doing a great service to our knowledge of language, but my head in.”