This article examines the strategies that Evelyn Fox Keller has employed to analyze the work of metaphor in the language and practice of science, particularly in biology. It offers that the rhetorical device of zeugma – ‘the use of a word to modify or govern two or more words usually in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense …’ (Merriam-Webster) – is worth leaning upon to further open up the linguistic operations Keller identifies as animating scientists’ talk of genetic codes and programs. Inspired by Indigenous and trans scholarship on the limits of metaphor, the piece argues for reinvigorated conversation about the politics of analogy in biology.
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