Apostrophe (a-pos’-tro-phe): Turning one’s speech from one audience to another. Most often, apostrophe occurs when one addresses oneself to an abstraction, to an inanimate object, or to the absent.
“Marty had a little clam. It’s shell was brown as mud. It followed him to school one day and was dissected in biology class. Mrs. Smart pulled out his guts and swung then around, making them go up and down. The clamshell was made into a brooch painted with purple flowers. Marty sold it at the farmers market for”$2.00 and bought 10 comic books for him to read in bed.”
Now, this story is all well and good with the exception of the walking clam. There is no such thing as a walking clam. If there were, they’d sell clam leashes at pet stores. And that’s that. The story is fictional, and certainly, is a vehicle for animal activists—the clam as alive when it is dissected—alive! If clams could only speak and cry out. What would the clam say?
What would you say clam? “Ow that hurts. Stop. You are killing me. Ooh that’s my belly! Yaaaa! Hellp! My foot—it’s ooozing.”
Now you are dead poor clam—diced up for no good reason. Laid out on a blood-stained table for the children to see—to learn it’s ok to hack things up for, in this case, for a lesson in biology. And then, the children are given dead frogs to hack up and revel in removing their organs and learning the organs’ names which should be “perversion” and “madness.” The children go home and attempt to to practice their new found skill on their puppies. They put the puppy in the oven and turn on the gas. Once the gas has done its job, they take the puppy out of the oven, lay it on a cutting board on the counter by the kitchen sink. They find a steak knife and begin their macabre task. When his mother returns home she sees the horrific scene: Buffer’s insides neatly arranged on the cutting board. Timmy walks slowly toward her with the steak knife pointed in her direction. She calls the police on the phone behind her on the wall. By the time the police arrive, it is too late for Timmy’s mother. Timmy had her liver and kidneys neatly arranged on the kitchen floor. He looked at Sgt.. Meally with a twisted grin and asked: “Do I get an A?”
Timmy became known as the “Dissection Devil.” He was convicted of murder and is serving a life sentence in the Iowa State Home for Convicted Criminals. Timmy pleaded insanity, but that was rejected because he had learned what he did in school in his biology class. Now, he strives to catch rats in the prison yard. Since he’s not allowed to have a knife, he tears them apart with his bare hands and arranges their insides neatly on the yard’s dirt surface.
What is the moral of this story? Knowledge is dangerous. If you don’t need it to do your job, stay away from it.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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