Ellipsis (el-lip’-sis): Omission of a word or short phrase easily understood in context.
“I can’t believe it! It’s so far beyond the pale that it’s beyond beyond the pale! What a goddamn . . . You clean it up! You made it! What the hell are we going to do?“
This is what I said when a crumb from my sister’s blueberry muffin missed her plate when it fell. It landed on the granite-topped kitchen island and I couldn’t bear it. I ran from the kitchen to tell my mother about the catastrophe, hoping my sister would be arrested.
I suffer from Chronic Hyper-Hysteria (CH-H). It is genetically transmitted like hemophilia. My great great great great great great grandfather was the little boy who cried wolf when he saw a squirrel. His true story has been distorted into a morality tale by do-gooders of the 16th century, and their publisher who made a lot of money from manuscript sales, and imprinted waistcoats, and gave my ancestors nothing.
Guess what? The famous Chicken Little story was based on another ancestor’s behavior. He lived in an apple-growing region of Germany. In early fall, when an apple would come lose and fall from a branch, he would run around the village yelling “The sky is falling.” When “Chicken Little” was finally written, out of fear of being sued for libel, the author substituted a chicken for my relative. He received no royalties and spent the rest of his life in a barn where nobody could hear him yelling “The sky is falling!”
Then, there was my great, great, great, great, uncle Paul. he lived in Massachusetts during the American Revolution. He was notoriously off-kilter, making and selling lead flagons and tin dinnerware, and selling them from a pushcart in downtown Boston. One day, he saw a cardinal sitting on a fence and yelled “The British are coming.” It was the cardinal’s red feathers that set him off insofar as the British troops wore red and were known as “Redcoats.”
Uncle Paul was in a panic. He pushed his pushcart home, had dinner and a couple of flagons of “Olde Shoe Buckle” ale, and then, stole his neighbor’s horse and rode all over the place (including flowerbeds and vegetable gardens) yelling “The British are coming.” The British didn’t come. But, an enterprising Benjamin Franklin knew that most of the Colonists didn’t know that and made up the story of the “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” making Uncle Paul into a celebrity, albeit a celebrity confined to “Drummer’s Rest” a home for men with “thwarted” brains.
In 1929 my great great great, great grandfather was standing by a ticker tape machine in his office on Wall Street, monitoring the Stock Market. He was drinking a bottle of his favorite carbonated beverage “Marvel/Jumbo/Double Cola.” He held the bottle up to the light and watched a bubble rise to the top and burst. In a panic he threw the bottle out the window and yelled “The bubble has burst.” His colleagues had seen it coming for months. When they heard my ancestor they panicked and started unloading all their stocks. As we know, the Stock Market crashed.
The brief overview above should give you a strong idea of how consequential Chronic Hyper-Hysteria has been. There is no cure and insurance companies will not cover it under any circumstances. I have had several unfortunate episodes in my own my own life, like the “He dismembers people” incident at Macy’s when I saw a worker putting mannequins away. There have been 100s of other episodes. I have been jailed several times. I’m the only one in the family who currently suffers from the family curse. Maybe some day I’ll be cured. Right now I am missing a matching sock. First, I will report it to the police. Then, I’ll tape flyers to telephone poles, and hand them out at the mall. Next I will . . . Well you get the picture.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
Buy a print version of The Daily Trope! The print version is titled The Book of Tropes and is available on Amazon for $9.99. There is also a Kindle edition
The Daily Trope 