Does this kind of simile have a more precise/specific name?

Question

From the song If You Go Down (I’m Goin' Down Too) by Kelsea Ballerini

I've known you since Brad and Angelina

We go back like Pontiac seats

From You Need To Calm Down by Taylor Swift

You are somebody that I don't know

But you're takin' shots at me like it's Patrón

People go back (know each other a long time) and Pontiac seats go back (recline), but the two senses of "go back" are so different that it doesn't even feel quite like a simile, perhaps because one is an idiom and one is a literal description.

Likewise, the shots that people take at Taylor Swift are not at all like shots of tequila.

Is there a name for a simile like this?

Answer 1

This is called zeugma (Ancient Greek for "yoking together"), when a word is attached to two separate phrases, and has a different sense in each phrase.

Some examples from Wikipedia:

• "Here Thou, great Anna! whom three Realms obey, / Dost sometimes Counsel take – and sometimes Tea" (Alexander Pope)
• "They covered themselves with dust and glory." (Mark Twain)
• "My blood sugar fell dramatically and so did I." (Elaine Stritch)

Answer 2

The first quote is clearly innuendo, “(logic) A rhetorical device with an omitted, but obvious conclusion, made to increase the force of an argument.”

It is is also underspecified because the outline of meaning that you draw is a false dichotomy that reduces the meaning to a mechanical act.

“We go back like Piontiac seats” is essentially not a ‘figure of speech’, that is a tag some Stackexchange user made up, appropriately defined as “any expressive use of language ...” (dictionary.com), or expression, or language for short, “... in which words are used in other than their literal sense, or in other than their ordinary locutions, in order to suggest a picture or image or for other special effect.”

As a rhetoric devise, it is an abuse of the conjunction, like, because the types of expression that it conjoins hardly match. The example I am looking at right now is German:

Drück Weiber runter wie bei Kniebeuge

There is a trope that comparisons with “like” (or “wie”) are not metaphor, but this is exactly what it is. I.e. the man suppresses bitches by pushing down and “wie Kniebeuge” (like squats) is anaphora (“Grammar*. the use of a word as a regular grammatical substitute for a preceding word or group of words,”, dictionary.com), except that it's not regular in a strict sense of grammaticality.

It stands to reason, if it is irregular, it is surprising and therefore a joke: “Haha haha?“ (Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times)

In the second example, “you're takin' shots at me like it's Patrón", the indefinite determiner is a dead giveaway. Syntactically, the usage is similar to “it's summer”, raising patrón to the level of a lasting occasion, whatever it may be.

Recursing on the first example with this analysis, Pontiac ought to be an experience, a kind of personal experience which somebody can be in, quite literally (if you know what i mean).

Zeugma is just another pretentious way to say same while ignoring what the word really means, “ζεῦγμα (zeûgma, “yoking; a bond, a band”)”, 1. based on a Verbalphrase view on grammar, “... particularly an adjective or verb, to apply to more than one noun ...“ 2. Syllepsis, even smarter pants wearing, “A figure of speech in which one word simultaneously modifies two or more other words ...” (en.Wiktionary)—literally every node in a syntax tree, at least in some view on syntax. In another view, it is simply wrong.

In the given example of squats, the intended implication may be that fans listen to the music while working out, comments under videos confirm. This is not supported by the syntax, at all. The device is mere allusion.