Enantiosis

Enantiosis (e-nan-ti-o’-sis): Using opposing or contrary descriptions together, typically in a somewhat paradoxical manner.

It’s not hot. It’s not cold. Is it just right? Maybe. What the hell is just right anyway? Was Goldilocks right when she sampled the Three Bears’ porridge? What’s the difference between hot and too hot, cold and too cold, and just right? It is all a matter of taste.

It is articulated by the tongue wrapping around the senses: taste tells us the story, the very personal story, of what repels and compels us. What doesn’t repel and compel us does not exist: indifference is a matter of taste.

I ate fermented shark in Iceland. It smelled so bad it came to the table in a sealed jar. I was told to open and close the jar as fast as I possibly could and stuff the shark in my mouth as fast as I could or the other patrons might evacuate the restaurant. I followed directions, and got the shark past my nose into my mouth. It smelled like a dead body, but it tasted exquisite—so exquisite that I placed another order.

How many experiences do we have like this in life?

Where on one “level” something is horrendous and on another level the same thing is sublime?

You may have a rich aunt who buys you a winter coat and then makes you wear it all the time. You’re sitting at the dinner table in your new peacoat from B. Altman’s sweating your ass off. You wear it like a bathrobe over your pajamas. Your mother makes you sleep in it so as not to insult Aunt April who is really rich and really old.

You get suspended from school for insisting on wearing your coat in class. When you try to explain, your teacher and the Principal laugh and shove you out the door.

The worst was being detained at the airport for refusing to take your coat off at airport security. They took you in a back room and told you to tell your story. They started laughing, cut off the coat’s buttons, and tore off the coat. They gave you the buttons off the floor to sew back on when you got where you were going.

You’re going to stay with Aunt April for a week in her mansion in Mawah, New Jersey. When she saw you in the buttonless coat at the airport, she screamed “Nooooooo!” She started swinging her purse and she hit you in the head with it. She knocked you unconscious. You wake up in a hospital bed wearing a new coat with a zipper. Aunt April says the coat is “just right,” and you think it’s all wrong.

But, it’s a matter of taste, the criterion from hell.

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

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