Enallage (e-nal’-la-ge): The substitution of grammatically different but semantically equivalent constructions.
You are doing so many things at once. How many things can you do at once? You’re like a spider weaving ten webs at once, or a person driving two cars, or a mother with 12 children. What? Why? Is your goal to fracture your consciousness so you can take a medical leave from Bill’s Brown Bag Bar & Grill? On top of everything else, shoving “medications” into bags and delivering them all over town must be taxing. The woman you met who claimed to be your mother must’ve driven you nuts, especially when you knew she was my mother! She’s been taking Bill’s medication for that past ten years. Luckily my dad left her with millions, or she’d be living in her underwear under a freeway overpass with the rest of the loons. She was a good mother before she got hooked on the stuff. Things came crashing down when dad gave her a hit and left home, all in one stroke. Mom lost it. She stopped washing our clothes. The other kids called me and my little sister “Stinky” and “Stinkier.” She stopped cooking. We had a can of unheated Dinty Moore beef stew every night. Also, mother insisted we finish off a bottle of wine with her every night. I went to elementary school half loaded every day. My teacher thought I had a speech impediment because I slurred my words. It was rough, but we broke out, even though Mother stuck with Bill’s medication. We talked her into giving us half of her fortune. Then, we hired a laundry service and went out to eat all the time. I applied to college and was admitted to UC Santa Barbara were I majored in Marine Biology—that’s part of the reason I own a chain of sushi restaurants, the other is my ownership of a wasabi factory in San Diego. Anyway, you need to focus. Find a single string and pull it like the chord on your Venetian blinds. A lot can happen with one pull. You can work in my wasabi factory. You can peel Japanese horseradish—you’ll have the clearest nostrils in California!
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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