'Pareidolia' and other fancy Greek words for common happenings

I have seen some weighty-sounding listicles lately: “More Paraprosdokians” and “30 Examples of Pareidolia.” These multisyllabic Greek words may look fancy and be hard to pronounce, but they refer to two things that are perfect for online sharing. 

A paraprosdokian (pronounced par a proz doe kee an) is a sentence with an unexpected ending, usually employed for comic effect. Pareidolia (pronounced par a doe lee a) is “the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern,” according to Merriam-Webster – seeing New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain in a cliff face, for example.  

Examples of pareidolia have been making the rounds on the internet for years, but got a bump this summer when a photographer snapped a picture of a wave off the coast of Britain. The wave looks so much like the face of a wrathful water god that the BBC reported on it: “‘Neptune’ appears in the waves during storm in Newhaven.” Pareidolia is a very old phenomenon, but the word itself is fairly recent. It was coined in Germany in the 19th century, from the Greek para- (“beyond”) and eidolon (“image”), and first appeared in English in 1962, a highfalutin word for a very common experience.  

Paraprosdokian is also formed from para- plus prosdokia (“expectation”). Some of these sentences with twist endings are famous, like Henny Youngman’s “Take my wife – please!” The audience thinks “take my wife” introduces an example, that he’s going to go on to talk about something she does or says. Ending with “please!” makes us revisit the beginning to understand it as a command – “take her away!” Comics have been enamored of the technique, from Groucho Marx (“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”) to Stephen Colbert (“If I am reading this graph correctly – I’d be very surprised.”) to Bertrand Russell (“War does not determine who is right, only who is left.”)

Etymologist Bill Casselman deplores the word paraprosdokian, arguing that, though it resembles classical terms for rhetorical techniques, it is an ugly neologism that was “unknown to ancient Greek or Latin rhetoric.” He makes a big deal over a little space, however, as para prosdokian does appear in ancient Greek rhetorical handbooks, and was called praeter exspectationem in Latin. 

Aristotle himself explains how humor arises when expectations are violated, and gives an example: “Onward he came, and his feet were shod with his – chilblains.” Listeners would have expected “sandals,” but they got “chilblains.” 

Take my ancient Greek philosopher, please!