Gnome (nome or no’-mee): One of several terms describing short, pithy sayings. Others include adage, apothegm, maxim, paroemia, proverb, and sententia.
My father taped pithy sayings all over my bedroom ceiling and walls. He thought they would “infuse” me with wisdom and help me grow up and be somebody. They glowed in the dark, so they never went away. I would try to sleep with a pillow over my head to block them out, but I nearly suffocated. I would briefly wake up at night and see in the greenish glow: “Broken crayons still color.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
I would try to get back to sleep, but I couldn’t until I could figure out what Ralph was trying to tell me. If we had computers back then, I would’ve just Googled it’s meaning. I moved my pillows around and focused my attention on it, although the other glowing sayings were calling out to me. First, I had never seen a broken crayon. Mine all wore down to nubs, and then, I threw them away. Nevertheless, I could see how you could use a broken crayon, and you would even have more crayons at the same time! Two, I got the idea that Ralph was trying to tell me to use broken things. Like if you break your toy fire truck, you can use it as a doorstop, or maybe, as a paperweight. This was kind of like saying on the ceiling: “Waste not want not.” I found this comparison interesting and wrote my thoughts down in my bedside notebook. Last: I thought “Why did Ralph use crayons to make his point?” I figured that out almost instantly: he probably wrote this for his children, who would be more “connected” to crayons than their elders, making the saying that much more salient and effective.
Voila! I had cracked it: there is no hidden meaning. Ralph is telling his children, and all children to stop whining for new crayons when the old ones break. When the children take the saying to heart, it will save him, and all fathers around the world, money. What a clever man!
Unlike my father.
When my hair started falling out and my gums started bleeding he took me to the Doctor who told us the glowing posters were highly radioactive and had been banned 2 years ago for safety reasons. I was suffering from a mild case of radiation poisoning from sleeping in a room full of radioactive posters. I took potassium iodide twice a day for the next year.
My father thought he was being really smart when he pulled the posters out of a random trashcan on his way to work, and then, plastered my bedroom with them to influence me. But as Melinda Gates said: “We have to be careful in how we use this light shined on us.” If I had lead pajamas, the light shining on me would have been harmless, and all of my physical problems would’ve been averted. In the future, after I recovered, I would say that my father almost killed me with wisdom. It was true. All he would say was “No pain, no gain, dipshit” and I would lunge at him and we’d wrestle on the floor until my mother broke us up with a wet mop. Quoting Edgar Allen Poe, she would yell “Nevermore!” We never went anywhere, but at least we stopped wrestling for awhile.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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