Skotison (sko’-ti-son): Purposeful obscurity.
The thing was moving around the other thing, slowly without joy or remorse. It was the kind of thing that affected other things in unpredictable ways. I was walking my dog and I looked down, and it, the thing, was there on the sidewalk, on its side, like it had been put there by something that wanted me to trip and fall on my face, which I did because I didn’t see the other thing alongside it. The thing made me skin my chin and made my dog run away when I fell. “Somebody’s got to do something about these things,” I thought as I stepped around them. But I had better things to do. Things had been piling up on my desk—things that were urgent, things that needed to be taken care of or other things would pile up.
“How things have changed,” I said to one of the things on my desk. It had been there so long that I threw it away. “It’s just one of those things,” I said as I started neatly stacking up the rest of the things, preparing to shove them off the side of my desk in a pile, into the trashcan with the things I had already discarded. They belonged together—a bunch of things with nothing in common except being things. I swore if I got one more thing in the mail I would stomp on it and leave it on the floor.
Just then, my wife walked into my office. She was carrying a tray. “Honey, I’ve made you your two favorite things. “Oh!” I exclaimed, “These things make my life light up. Not like these things in the wastebasket that do bad things.” I had something to drink and gobbled up the 2 sugary things on the plate on the tray. I told my wife, “These are the things that make life worthwhile.” She said, “Honey, I wish you wouldn’t say ‘thing’ all the time.”
I was shocked. “Thing talk” had always been a hobby of mine. In our 8 years together Marissa had never complained. “Why do you mention it now after all these years?” “Your ‘thing’ has lost its meaning to me, as surrounded as it is by all the other things, it does not stand out. It is just another thing.” I stopped calling everything “thing” and reserved it solely for my thing. Marissa was overjoyed. Something had returned to our marriage. Things returned to normal.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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