Antisagoge (an-tis-a-go’-gee): 1. Making a concession before making one’s point (=paromologia); 2. Using a hypothetical situation or a precept to illustrate antithetical alternative consequences, typically promises of reward and punishment.
I know I’m not the world’s smartest man, but I don’t have the to be to know the difference between ale and lager. It’s a close call, but they’re different. They’re both beer, but it takes less lager to get drunk, if you have the right lager in hand, maybe 20-25% alcohol, you get totally shitfaced after six mugs in 20 minutes, and then stumble home or run into a tree with your pickup.
Think about it, you’ve had five ales and you’re still standing. You live in NYC and you’re in for $50. You can still see straight. Your speech isn’t slurred. You didn’t stagger to the men’s room—even after your third visit. You haven’t gotten in any fights. You haven’t even come close to falling off your bar stool. If you stick with ale, you’re looking at another 30-40 dollars down the hatch to get good and drunk. You suck it up and order another ale. I, on the other hand, have already vomited and almost wet my pants. I’m going to have another lager anyway. I’m looking forward to giving everyone the peace sun as the bouncer leads me out the door. I’m no genius, but I think being “bounced” is a noteworthy accomplishment. The last time it happened to me, I got a standing ovation as I was shown to the door.
So there! Walking home drunk from “Zulu Spear Bar and Grill” is dangerous. One section of the street is called “Mugger’s Run.” After 11.00 pm, you run down it as fast as you can with your pockets turned inside out and your wallet stuffed in your underpants. When they ask where your wallet is you tell them: “The guy up the street got it, Sorry.” They’re too lazy to strip search you, so you’re off the hook. Talking about hooks, you’ve got to deal with hookers too. After you refuse their pleasures, they’ll insist on taking selfies with you with your phone. They will put your hand on a part of their anatomy that is incriminating. They’ll take a picture with their phone too and ask for your number so they can text the picture to you. You’re in a drunken haze so you’ll agree to anything (except their advances). Why are you able to nix a romp is your vivid memory of an unholy STD. You had used a condom made in China and it failed—it caught on fire and you were in hospital for a week, fighting the clap and relatively minor burns. So, I had sworn off sex forever. But anyway, you see the selfie the next day on your phone with a “bill” for the photo, taken by a pro on the street. You pay the $50 and get another bill for $50 later that afternoon. You resign yourself to paying $100 a day to keep the photo in the right hands.
There’s more to the drunken walk home, like being chased by rats, tripping over a dead body, seeing an alligator’s head poking out of a storm sewer, seeing a guy playing a guitar with no strings and mouthing the lyrics silently, and worst, a guy in some kind of uniform with a kettle hanging from a tripod, and a hand bell bleeding from a gunshot wound to his shoulder. Nobody called 911. He shouldn’t have been there. It’s bad enough you see him at the mall at Christmas time.
So, in the future, you take a cab, or a bus home, loaded on lager and lost in space.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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