Periergia (pe-ri-er’-gi-a): Overuse of words or figures of speech. As such, it may simply be considered synonymous with macrologia. However, as Puttenham’s term suggests, periergia may differ from simple superfluity in that the language appears over-labored.
“There was a time when the flowing juices of riper moments squeezed their promise onto waiting heads, waiting to be anointed by tomorrow’s sweet juices, cleansing history’s smut from the future.”
I think Francis Gumnuts was the greatest poet ever. The quote above is from a little-known work of his published in 1666 at the height of the plague epidemic in London. It is titled “Fever.” The quoted lines have been interpreted as a paean to pustules, trying to see them in a positive light and give people covered by them a ray of hope. Another favorite of mine is “Bird Droppings.” Gumnuts is sitting on a log by a lily pond musing on a patiently fishing Crane quietly waiting, not moving, waiting for a minnow or a sunfish to swim by, when suddenly, a large flock of noisily cawing crows flys overhead, raining guano, hitting Gumnuts several times on the head and soiling his doublet with “chalky whitish goo.” He wrote: “The dozing day was passing as the slender crane concentrated upon a feast—a sunfish or a minnow blatantly sought by a blade like beak glinting yellow like a frozen bolt of burning light. And then! And then! And then! A company of raucous crows doth mount the air above my head—a darkness-forming horde of feathered demons. Now, they crap. They poop. They shite. A devil’s cloudburst of guano raining everywhere, beating down upon my head, soiling my doublet, knocking down the hapless crane. The flock passed and I looked around. The world was cloaked in white. ‘Twas like fresh fallen snow on a pristine winter’s morn. The guano was a gift so beautiful, I could not help but cry.”
Wow! Shite to snow! Gumnuts had a gift—he could wrest good from evil. His muscular transformations show how personal effort can make the world anew—shite is only shite because you want it to be, even when you step in it and it smells up your shoe. The use of euphemisms is especially helpful as a powerful instrument of reality’s transformation. For example, “poo-poo,” and “doo-doo”:smooth out shite, and “bun” speaks to its similarity to a jelly donut or a cruller. Although it still may be shite, it’s creative renaming bolsters an attitude shift, enabling a more positive quality of experience at the sight and smell of shite. After the Stoics, Gumnuts lived in accord with what he called “interpretive beneficence,” living out his final years in a hollowed out heap of garbage. Followers of his would drive by in their carts and shovel fresh trash on his “Stately Garbage Dome.”
This is all pretty remarkable. What’s most remarkable is Gumnuts’ obscurity. I’m a graduate student at Cargo Docks University in Utrecht. I am writing my doctoral dissertation on Gumnuts’ use of words to say things. My first, and most bizarre, discovery, is that Gumnuts’ early manuscripts are written in Japanese, which leads me to think he may have travelled to Japan. His first extant manuscript, which hasn’t been translated, is his lengthiest manuscript. The title page has a sketch of what looks like a flop-eared hamster with a meat cleaver for a tail. The manuscript is titled “Pikachu.”
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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