Aphaeresis

Aphaeresis (aph-aer’-e-sis): The omission of a syllable or letter at the beginning of a word. A kind of metaplasm.

‘Bout time you got here Bozo. You know, time does not last forever. It is like a frozen lily or a bowl of ice cream. Here today, gone to Hoboken tomorrow. It’s complicated. It’s complex. It’s convoluted. It goes tick tock or it hums with electric inner workings.

I tried to explain the majesty of time to my nephew. I bought him a wristwatch on his third birthday. He said, “Time fly” and threw it at the living room wall, laughing. The watch was destroyed. I wanted to hit him, but I knew my sister would get mad, so I hit her instead. She punched me between the eyes and I fell down. When I woke up I had a cuckoo clock mounted on my head. I couldn’t remove it and it never needed winding. I would cuckoo every hour, without fail. I’d be riding on the bus and I’d start to cuckoo. It irritated the other passengers, and often, I’d be removed from the bus forcefully by them—once when the buss was moving.

So finally, I got a job as a cuckoo clock in a pawn shop. I was not for sale and lived in the back room of the pawn shop, “Mr. Fence’s.”

Then one day I was standing there marking time when a pocket watch flew through the door like a flying saucer. It hovered in front of my face and said “Your time is up.” My cuckoo clock fell off my head and smashed on the floor. I was “normal” again! I thanked the pocket watch and it said “no problem” as it settled in to the top of my head.

Suddenly my mind was filled with sayings about time—time flies, time is a thief, a stitch in tine, let the good times roll, etc. I didn’t know what it all meant. But I felt like I was becoming a ticking time bomb. I lost my job and wandered the streets of Athens, GA. The pocket watch said “You need a time out.” The pocket watch had an alarm. I was hired by a wealthy man to be his human alarm clock. He would set me before he went to bed and I would wake him up in the morning. If he did not get up, I would yell at him. One morning he hit me in the face with a hiking boot. I had no idea why. I retaliated with my box cutter. Now I’m serving 12 years for manslaughter. Time passes slowly here in prison, but there’s a time and a place for everything. I’ll serve my time and then take my time rebuilding my life. My hope is to learn how to repair wall clocks, and time is on my side. I’m only 34. The pocket watch is hidden away in my hair. He served my time with me. We’re together all the time, but he stopped talking to me. I think his battery went dead around five years ago. Oh well, off we go. We can’t afford to waste any time.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)

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