In English language, one equivocation is with the word "man", which can mean both "member of the species, Homo sapiens," and " male member of the species, Homo sapiens." The following sentence is a well-known equivocation: "Do women need to worry about man-eating sharks?", in which "man-eating" is construed to mean a shark that devours only male human beings. These meanings often coincide within proper context, but the fallacious arguer does a semantic shift, slowly changing the context by treating, as equivalent, distinct meanings of the term. The fallacy of equivocation is often used with words that have a strong emotional content and many meanings. Because the " middle term" of this syllogism is not one term, but two separate ones masquerading as one (all feathers are indeed "not heavy", but it is not true that all feathers are "bright"), this type of equivocation is actually an example of the fallacy of four terms. In this use of equivocation, the word "light" is first used as the opposite of "heavy", but then used as a synonym of "bright" (the fallacy usually becomes obvious as soon as one tries to translate this argument into another language). Fallacious reasoningĮquivocation is the use in a syllogism (a logical chain of reasoning) of a term several times, but giving the term a different meaning each time. One example is the contrast between birth and death, and birth and berth, and told and toll'd in Thomas Hood's account of the death of Ben the sailor (which took place at the age of 40, contrasted with his age of zero at birth) in his humorous poem Faithless Sally Brown: His death, which happen'd in his berth, At forty-odd befell: They went and told the sexton, and The sexton toll'd the bell. However, their different senses become obvious only upon a moment's reflection. This form of word play relies upon two different words that sound alike. 2 Specific types of equivocation fallacies.