PARAPROSDOKIAN

HA!  GOTCHA!  Don't you dare run to your dictionary before reading this item.  You have to see it through.  After all, it's been a few days now since we have communicated, so give it a chance to communicate.  You might want to start by thinking about what could be a synonym for paraprosdokian.  Can't think of one?  Wow!  Maybe because no one else can.  Not even the thesaurus nor the dictionary.  This is a word that in and of itself is one of those that has been constructed to bamboozle people into thinking that they know something more than their friends.  It is the marriage, sometimes happy and sometimes not, of two Greek words that the inventor says means that the second part of a sentence is surprising in a way that makes the hearer reinterpret the first part.
Got that?  How about some examples?
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like bananas.
I've had some wonderful evenings, this was not one of them.
There was a cute little book, there still is, but I don't know where any more, that had the title, "The Koala eats, leaves, and shoots."  I read it.  Unfortunately after the title, it was rather boring.  The cover, though, I will never forget.  Imagine, $12.00 for a cover!  Now you know what paraprosdokia are and you now know the grammatically correct plural form of that nasty word.
To make things easier for you, let me just say that paraprosdokianism is a form of linguistic ambiguity.  We have a lot of that in the English language, but we don't think of it in our everyday lives.  It is something that we use to make ourselves smile.  For instance, how many of you really know what Groucho Marx meant when he said, "I once shot an elephant in my pajamas.  How the elephant got into my pajamas I really don't know."  Better still, and a lot more ambiguous is the headline, "Police help dog bite victim."
What are you laughing at?
Let me leave you with a sex oriented sentence, (It's safe for work, don't worry) "I'm glad I'm a man, and so is Lola."
So, friends, don't let yourselves fall into paraprosdokianizing.  No one will understand you.