Zeugmatic

In Competition No. 2463 you were invited to incorporate in a piece of plausible prose examples of the following terms: oxymoron, personification, simile, hyperbole, archaism, periphrasis, solecism, paronomasia, alliteration, epizeuxis. My apologies for having misspelt ‘paronomasia’ in setting the comp. At least it gave Mike Lunan the chance to launch a mocking epizeuxis combined with alliteration at me: ‘Paranomasia, paranomasia? You stupid son of a simpleton, it’s not spelt like that.’ Five of you misread the instructions and incorporated the terms themselves instead of examples of them, with very strange results. My favourite bad pun was Philippa Mellon’s ‘After all this deep art it was time to depart’ and the most intriguing oxymoron Miriam Pender’s ‘appetising sausage roll’. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each and the bonus fiver goes to D.A. Prince.

He knew the scribbling tribe would be concentrating on his every word, like cats listening for the stir of mice before a kill.