Litotes (li-to’-tees): Deliberate understatement, especially when expressing a thought by denying its opposite. The Ad Herennium author suggests litotes as a means of expressing modesty (downplaying one’s accomplishments) in order to gain the audience’s favor (establishing ethos).
How undeserving. How unworthy. How embarrassed by all this. I say “So what?” I am half the man you think I am. I’m “not what I’m cracked up to be.” I didn’t build anything, but I did make a difference—a minimal difference that destroyed as much as it produced, showing everything has two sides, at least. You’re all sitting here in rags with rice bowls hanging around your necks because of what I did—but instead of wanting to kill me, you want to hug me. And I should give credit to my imp friend Harry Stillskin, sitting over there with his hand on my wife, who helped me pull it all together.
I was stumbling through life with no direction when I met Harry perched on a stool at The Blue Moon Bar and Grill here in Lodi. I sat down next to him and he bought me a beer. He asked me to guess his name. He was wearing a bowling shirt that said Harry on it. So I said, “Harry?” He said, “Damn, that’s right. I should’ve listened to my wife—she told me not to wear my bowling shirt when I wasn’t with my buddies.” We drank a few more beers and got half-loaded. Harry asked me what I did for a living. As a joke, I told him I was a deep-sea diver. He looked shocked. He told me that salt water would set him on fire, so he had to stay from the ocean. I thought he was kidding me, so I let it pass. He told me he was in the kidnapping business. Now, the bullshit was getting out of hand. I ordered two more beers and asked him to elaborate.
He told me he had a spinning wheel that had been in his family for hundreds of years. The spinning wheel spun gold! He would find desperate mothers and make a deal: He would take the babies and spin gold. If the mother could guess his name, she would get to keep the gold and get her baby back. If she failed guess his name, he would keep the baby and the gold. He said it was surprising how few women could guess his name. One would think that “Harry” would be pretty easy to guess. He sold the babies to a baby broker in Canada, no questions asked.
I was stunned. “Bullshit!” was all I could think to say. With slightly slurred speech Harry said, “Oh yeah? Come on. Let’s take a walk.” We walked up the street and came to an old barn—a vestige of Lodi’s horse and buggy days. Harry waved at the door and it slowly opened. Inside there was a spinning wheel, an executive leather swivel chair, a wooden stool and a crib. God! He wasn’t kidding. He churned out a couple of ounces of gold and we split them 50-50. I asked him if we could hire a crew to spin night and day and Harry said “Ok.” So, that’s what we did out of sheer greed. But then, we had so much gold that we bagged it up and dumped it all over Lodi, and then all over the US. Our spinners had come under some kind of spell and couldn’t stop spinning.
The rest is history.
The world was glutted with gold. The price plummeted to 10 cents per ounce. Paper money lost it’s value, among other things, it was used as kindling to start fires. Bartering made a comeback. We have learned to do without. I am valorized for causing a worldwide economic collapse (along with Harry). But, so much good has come of it. When we’re all poor, everybody’s poor. We achieve an equality of misery and freedom from the nagging hunger for material gain. We may be ill-clothed and hungry all the time, but at least we’re all still alive (with the exception of the infirm and the elderly).
Harry and I are so undeserving. Really, it’s our out-of-control gold spinners who made all this happen. So let’s raise a toast to them, resting in their urns in the showcase back there. It was the only way to stop them. .
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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