Monthly Archives: January 2022

Allegory

Posted on January 6, 2022 | Comments Off on Allegory

Allegory (al’-le-go-ry): A sustained metaphor continued through whole sentences or even through a whole discourse.

“Oh dear, what shall I do now?” cried Mad Donald. His first thought was to ride his carriage to Royal Burger and assuage his sorrow with two Triple Beef Barges, a Great Sugar Croak, and two boxes of Flemish Tarts. “I lost” he sobbed. “Royal Burger won’t do—I want to win, not just eat myself into a stupor.”

Mad Donald called his loyal cut-throats, with Bathless Steve Bunion taking charge of coming up with a strategy. Bunion remembered when he was child. He lied to his parents every day, and he got his way every day because his parents loved him and were gullible. He loved to lie about lying. He liked it more than riding his donkey, or eating candy.

He told Mad Donald about his childhood success getting his way as a liar. Mad Donald enthusiastically agreed: “Yes! Why didn’t I think of that? I lie all the time. So, what do we do now?” “We lie!” exclaimed Bunion. “About what do we lie?” asked Mad Donald. “The jousting match you lost! Have you forgotten? If you had won, you would have been showered with riches and been declared a celebrity throughout the land.” “Oh, that’s right.” said Don, and they started to make a plan, based in lies, to make Mad Don a winner. In brief, this is what they came up with:

—George Sorenose drugged Mad Donald’s horse

—Mirrors made it look like Mad Donald fell off his horse

—Mad Donald’s lance was shortened

—Mad Donald’s gauntlets we’re poisoned and his hands fell asleep

Once word got out, Mad Donald’s fans went crazy and made a slogan: “Cheater, cheater, vegetable eater, Moe Biten didn’t beat you!” The slogan did wonders as a unifying chant, and also, to deflect peoples’ thoughts from the truth. They massed together and attacked the jousting grounds, burning them to the ground, but saving the championship trophy to give to Mad Donald, the true winner (as far as they were concerned).

Mad Donald and Bunion were arrested the next day for conspiring to rig the games, and thereby inciting a riot. Their lies had been revealed throughout the land. But still, to the puzzlement of Moe Biten, 68% of Mad Donald’s fans still believed him. But nobody else did. They attacked the jail, dragged the two prisoners outside, and impaled them on jousting lances.

This was a bad day in the history of the United Incorporated States. It taught us to keep jousting lances under lock and key, let the government kill bad people, and to try not to lie too much or you will get caught.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

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Alleotheta

Posted on January 5, 2022 | Comments Off on Alleotheta

Alleotheta (al-le-o-the’-ta): Substitution of one case, gender, mood, number, tense, or person for another. Synonymous with enallage. [Some rhetoricians claim that alleotheta is a] general category that includes antiptosis [(a type of enallage in which one grammatical case is substituted for another)] and all forms of enallage [(the substitution of grammatically different but semantically equivalent constructions)].

The car was Donna’s. I could tell by the make and model, but also by them bumper stickers—“Eat More Cottage Cheese” and “Support Your Local Clown” and “No Swearing Allowed in Heaven. You Better Stop Swearing Now.”

She always told each of her friends to bring gas money if they wanted to ride with her. But here it was in the middle of the night —parked by the roadside—9:00 pm to be exact. I never would’ve seen it if I weren’t headed for Vegas. I had taken out a home equity line of credit for $20,000 and I was on my way to make it into $200,000 playing poker at the Flamingo Casino. I had bought a system on the internet that guaranteed a winning hand every time. I was ready to rip!

But now, I was flipping out. Donna was out there somewhere, walking around the desert. Then I heard a voice cry out: “Hey you got a tissue?” It was Donna! She was peeking over the hood of her car. “I had to take a wicked leak, and remembered I didn’t have any wipes in my car until it was too late. You’re a Godsend Nicky.” Lucky for Donna I had an unopened pack of Kleenex in my truck. I got them and handed them to her while she hunched behind her car.

The luck of crossing paths with Donna was overwhelming. I felt like it was a message from above. I had loved her since middle school, but she didn’t love me. We had kissed once, but that was it. Over the years, I’ve counted her boyfriends—27 to be exact. Maybe out here on this lonely highway, I might have a chance to try again. I grabbed her and held her close. She screamed and hit me in the face with her cellphone. My cheek was bleeding and I tried to apologize, but she jumped in her car and drove away, tires screeching.

I got to the casino around 11:00 pm. My cheek had scabbed up, but my ego was still bleeding. I decided to play keno instead of poker. By 4:00 am I won $40,000. I was ready to pack it in when I saw Donna! She was walking toward me smiling. She was holding my pack of Kleenex. “These are yours Nicky” she said as she held them out to me. “Yeah, thanks” I said as I took them and stuffed them in my back pocket. “I’m glad you stopped bleeding” she said. “Yeah” I said. “Let’s get a room” she said. I said “Really?” Donna said “Yes.” So we did.

We spent three nights at the Flamingo. I won $240,000.00. We were married on the third day at the Chapel of the Bells. That was ten years ago. And to think, I actually considered murdering Donna after she hit me in the face with her cellphone.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

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Alliteration

Posted on January 4, 2022 | Comments Off on Alliteration

Alliteration (al-lit’-er-a’-tion): Repetition of the same letter or sound within nearby words. Most often, repeated initial consonants. Taken to an extreme alliteration becomes the stylistic vice of paroemion where nearly every word in a sentence begins with the same consonant.

Trucks, tracks, tigers. Triggers, Tootsie Rolls, Tambourines. Tacos, tattletales, tourniquets.

Bitter beverage. Big Ben. Better burger.

You may think “So what?” I say, “Ha!” Throughout history, many innovations have been initiated by the play of alliteration. The list is laboriously long. So, let’s take one example: buttered bread.

In 1620 Dunstable Clodwell was shivering by the meager little fire in his drafty little cruck. His cruck was plastered with wattle, manure, and hay. His cow, Holy Mary, took up a lot of room even though she was backed into a corner, however, she generated a lot of heat and helped warm the cruck. Outside the Black Death was raging. Dunstable had resigned himself to certain death, but he was hungry. The neighbor woman Sharona Pinkwinkle always had food—she took it in exchange for doing laundry, and, as she said, “Pleasing the boys.” Sharona was big and busty. As usual, she had set out a slice of bread and a blob of butter, anticipating Dunstable’s regular dinner time visit. He ate his bread separately from his butter as everybody did back then. He looked at Sherona as he prepared to bite into his bread. He was behind her and thought “big butt” to himself, and holding his bread still, he thought, “butt on bread” and laughed to himself. Then, looking at the butter blob, he thought “as I live and breathe, what ho, what can butter on bread be?” And that was it: he put his butter on his bread and took a bite. “Mmmmm” he exclaimed, “that’s good, and I only need one hand to eat it. If I had a flagon of ale, I could hold it in my free hand, gulping it down after each bite of my butter bread.”

Sadly, Dunstable died two days later from the Black Death. He was found on his corncob mattress clutching a piece of buttered bread in his cold hand.

So, even though Dunstable didn’t know what an alliteration was, the connected consonants “b” built a bridge and sparked a realization—from big butt to butter bread the die was cast, and made smearing substances on bread a widespread practice.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

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Allusion

Posted on January 3, 2022 | Comments Off on Allusion

Allusion (ə-ˈlü-zhən):[1] A reference/representation of/to a well-known person, place, event, literary work, or work of art . . . “a brief reference, explicit or indirect, to a person, place or event, or to another literary work or passage”. It is left to the reader or hearer to make the connection . . . ; an overt allusion is a misnomer for what is simply a reference.[2]

I was floating in my hot tub, when I remembered once when I was in a bar in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Two men beat the crap out of each other in a dispute over what “four score a seven years ago means.” One of them actually believed “score” was a reference to Lincoln’s drug dealing, a sort of bookkeeping strategy for tallying sales for the past seven years. The other guy believed “score” was a cryptic message to the Freemasons, referring to the lines etched into bricks to break them neatly to size: four score referring to the four points of the compass etched in a sacred brick, and “seven years ago” as the last time the Freemasons had built a pyramid.

Even though it was clear that neither of the men had read the “Gettysburg Address” (that was clear from their interpretations) both of them developed, and fought over, the completely bogus and crazy opposing positions they took.

As he was being wheeled out of the bar on a stretcher with a swollen bleeding nose, a fractured elbow, and a neck brace, I asked one of the men where he got his ideas from. He snapped back, struggling under the stretcher’s restraints: “From my head, jackoff. This is America, I can believe what I want to believe. You, or nobody else can tell me what to believe!” At that point, I wanted to call Scotty and beam up, back to sanity land.

Anyway, the memory of the event scared me all over again. Is it true that the will to believe is all the reason that’s needed to believe—that the lunatics in the Harpers Ferry bar had a right fight it out over their conflicted interpretations?

I climbed out of my hot tub, donned my spa towel, and headed for the liquor cabinet. I filled a water glass with Johnny Walker Black, went to my bedroom, put on my pajamas, and picked up Umberto Eco’s “Interpretation and Overinterpretation” from the nightstand next to my bed. I had some reading to do, but would I get the meaning right?

1. Phonetic transcription courtesy of Miriam-Webster’s On-Line Dictionary: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/allusion <3/6/08>.

2. Definition courtesy of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion <3/6/08>.

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Amphibologia

Posted on January 2, 2022 | Comments Off on Amphibologia

Amphibologia (am’-fi-bo-lo’-gi-a): Ambiguity of grammatical structure, often occasioned by mispunctuation. [A vice of ambiguity.]

My mother liked our dentist more than me. She sent him candy on his birthday and wore rubber gloves everywhere. She would get high on black market nitrous oxide in the basement in her “dental chair”—a swivel chair mounted on cinder blocks with a naked lightbulb hanging above it. She even wore a little bib, and spit on it.

I, on the other hand, thought our dentist was a sadistic monster captivated by other peoples’ pain. One time, he tried pull out one of my teeth with a pair of pliers. When it wouldn’t come out, he shattered it with a hammer, and collected the tooth fragments off the floor with a whisk broom and a dustpan. It took one hour to remove the tooth with no novocaine, or anything. After it was over he called me a good boy and gave me a silver dollar. I swore I would kill him after school the next day, but I couldn’t come up with a plan and I didn’t know where his office was.

So, you can see why my mother liked our dentist more than me!

Mom was finally institutionalized for her dentalphillia. We committed her when she started flossing our dog’s teeth and trying to make me and Dad wear bibs at the dinner table.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu). Bracketed text added by Gorgias.

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Ampliatio

Posted on January 1, 2022 | Comments Off on Ampliatio

Ampliatio (am’-pli-a’-ti-o): Using the name of something or someone before it has obtained that name or after the reason for that name has ceased. A form of epitheton.

Before

Hey Genius! You’re going to be the smartest PhD ever. Astrophysics? Electrical Engineering? History. Math? Creative Writing? When you’re old enough to talk, we can figure it out. In the meantime, I’ve gotten you some toys: a rubber squeaky star, a big battery pillow for your cribby, an antique rattle, a toy calculator, and “The Three Little Pigs” book I can read to you: a great work of literature.

After

Hey Handsome! Pull your blubber butt up over here. I remember, back in the day you rivaled David Bowie for adoration. A new girl every week. You were something else. You even had hair and all your teeth. Too bad corn on the cob is on the menu. The reunion organizers should’ve thought of people like you. Our lives have morphed. I’m an artist—I paint in acrylics and pull in half a million per year doing portraits and landscapes around the world. I understand you’re a night manager at Burger King. I bet you smell like a cheeseburger when you go home. Too bad about your wife taking off with the exterminator.

Oh well, things change as time goes by. If you lost 100 pounds and got a hair transplant, maybe you could regain some of your cred. Oh, when did you get out of prison?

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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