Procatalepsis

Procatalepsis (pro-cat-a-lep’-sis): Refuting anticipated objections.

I know you’re going to tell me it shouldn’t be done, that it can’t be done, that it won’t be done. I’ve been listening to nay-sayers all my life. So far, they’ve been right, except perhaps, when when I cleared the haunted house with a vacuum cleaner—a brand new Hoover that I got a generous grant to purchase from our beloved St. Limo University. $120.00. A small price to pay to be cleared of poltergeists. It was the Dean’s house that was making trouble. I vacuumed his house from ceiling to floor, from attic to basement—every nook and cranny, every square inch. I played Kraftwerk’s “Show Room Dummies” over and over too. I felt the Dean’s ghosts might be of French origin and be repelled by Kraftwerk’s German accent. Our university is in very close proximity to Quebec, being located in North-Central New York on the Canadian border. We soon discovered that the ghostly sounds were coming from a loose cold water pipe in the basement. I still had $200.00 in my research account which the Dean “reappropriated” to help offset the cost of his University-sponsored 25th wedding anniversary. I was instructed to give my Hoover to the Dean’s wife so she could “continue my researches” in their house.

Now, you are all probably wondering what’s next for me here at St. Limo University. You should be sure, given my recounting of the success of my “Ghost Sucker” in certifying the absence of ghosts in the Dean’s residence. So your mockery and complaints will fall on deaf ears. So don’t try to censure me—especially you jerks in the English Department. It is shameful that you write poems—poems about trees, depression, fixing motorcycles, opium, and veiled sexual references to your mothers and fathers. Your longer works are just extended meditations on the same filthy poetic topics—more vulgar, detailed, meaningless and disgusting in their long form. I’m surprised you haven’t been featured in a documentary on the depravity of English Departments.

Ok, my next project. I will be amputating one of my fingers (including my thumbs) each month for the next ten months. Once all my digits are removed, I will research the human behavior known as “pounding.” Finger-free, I will be positioned to pound on things for longer periods of time, giving more opportunities to study the phenomenon. I will have a control pounder, a student with whom I can make comparative observations and analyses and seek comfort with at the end of each day, pounding together. In addition, my nephew, who works in a shipyard in Maine, has made me a pounding board out of maple, cherry, and oak—the holy Trinity of pounding boards. The pounding board is like a pounder’s pitch pipe. Roughly, maple makes a pounding sound that sounds like a fat man falling oh his belly on a slate floor, Cherry expresses the sound of a person being beaten on the face by a leek. Oak is in a league all its own, sounding as it does like a physically fit person carrying 2 bags of groceries being run over by a subcompact car at 5 miles per hour. These are the foundational sounds of pounding. All pounding is a variation on maple, cherry and oak, properly wielded, properly attuned.

When my pounding study is complete, and I am left bereft of thumbs and fingers, I intend to wear surgical gloves filled with sand. I will also be filing a lawsuit against St. Limo University for allowing me to mutilate myself. Oh, Dean Smudge, you have a question? “No, I have a request. Stay where you are. Campus Security is on the way. They’re going to take you to a quiet place with bars where you can think up more great research projects,” the Dean said with through his University Events Bullhorn.

I was amazed and disheartened by what was going on.. After all, I had given my vacuum cleaner to the Dean’s wife.

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

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