Anamnesis (an’-am-nee’-sis): Calling to memory past matters. More specifically, citing a past author [apparently] from memory. Anamnesis helps to establish ethos [credibility], since it conveys the idea that the speaker is knowledgeable of the received wisdom from the past.
When I was a kid, I didn’t whine about walking 2 miles to school through 4 feet of snow, with drifts 8 feet high. I was too poor to afford mittens so I wore socks on my hands. Although he didn’t like it, I strapped cat to my head to keep my ears warm. My winter coat was a yellow raincoat lined with Sunday newspapers. I had normal pants, but they were too big. The cuffs dragged in the snow, coating them with heavy snow bergs. I wore my grandfather’s goulashes. He was dead, but his goulashes had done him well. They were lovingly patched. He was walking the mile to Cliff’s when he died. His foot got stuck in a crack in the sidewalk. Nobody helped him and he froze to death. He had gone to Cliff’s te get a package of Jolly Ranchers and a quart of holiday egg nog. But anyway, I inherited his goulashes and I am taking good care of them.
If you would read “Blizzard” by Bucky Bells, you’d have a vivid sense of what I’m talking about—I know what I said above is pretty scary, but yet, I quote from memory: “You could smell the Yeti the minute you went out the door. Yesterday, it had eaten Joey, my neighbor friend. There were blood and bones all over the sidewalk and Joey’s red knitted hat was hanging from a tree stained with blood. I had started carrying an axe to school to fight off the Yeti if I had to. The day he attacked me, I chopped off his arm and he ran away screaming.”
I never personally met the Yeti on my way to school, but I did smell him. He smelled like the homeless man who lived in the bushes outside the entrance to the middle school. His name was Ned and he was an ex-convict. He had been jailed for selling counterfeit Barbie dolls on the village square. It was a scandal. Ned came from a prominent family that had a tremendously successful greeting card business. Accordingly, when Ned was convicted, he received cards taunting him, like “Congratulations,” and “You worked Hard. You deserve it.”
So anyhow, with global warming, you won’t have to endure what I endured—maybe a dusting of snow or a sparkly frost is all you have to deal with. You could survive a week in Antarctica in your hooded goose down suits and heated boots. Walking to school in winter no longer builds character. You might as well take a cab for all the good it does you.
Don’t ask me for cab fare.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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