Brachylogia (brach-y-lo’-gi-a): The absence of conjunctions between single words. Compare asyndeton. The effect of brachylogia is a broken, hurried delivery.
“Pile, car, laying.” It was his last gasp. They were his final words as he lay there bleeding under his lawnmower. We had been hunting Mr. Scarzone for 2 years. He had stolen Prince Charles’ beloved polo mallet. Charles believed it brought him luck on the Royal Field of glory. Scarzone was adept at evading capture. He had hidden the stolen polo mallet and vowed he never reveal where it was hidden. When he was on the run, he would email cryptic messages to taunt us about its whereabouts. They were all adventures in misdirection, but we had to follow them for the sake of the Prince, who had become, more than usual, an intolerable whining twit—a boundless rotter.
Two weeks before he committed rotary mower suicide, as Director of the “Mallet Recovery Task Force,” I received another email from him. It said simply “High Marks.” After hours of deliberation, we were sure that the “High” was the “High” in “High Gate Cemetery,” where all the famous miscreants are buried. “Marks” referred to “Karl Marx” who is one of the famous miscreants buried there. We jumped in our police cars and with sirens blaring we headed for High Gate.
Nothing was disturbed around Marx’s grave. We searched the woods adjoining the grave, believing the mallet would be disguised as a small tree. It wasn’t. We had been misled again. I was infuriated, but there was nothing I could do.
In the meantime, the Prince purchased a new polo mallet that he believed was bringing him good luck. He found a woman who was “miles better” than his current “hag of a wife” and his watercolors had improved. So, the task force was to be disbanded the following week.
Even though we were disbanded long ago—eight years ago to be exact—I’ve been trying to decipher Scarezone’s last words. I have failed. I have given up. The polo mallet is forever lost.
I was getting ready to retire and was going to have a car boot sale and get rid of the junk that had been accumulating in my garage for the past twenty years. I had bundles of “Police Gazette” magazine piled up five feet high. I was thinking about how stupid it was to save them. Then, I saw something that looked like a broomstick in the two-inch space between a couple of stacks of “Gazettes.” I pushed them back, and you guessed it: it was the missing polo mallet. Goddamn it! Mr. Scarzone had hidden the polo mallet in my garage. Bastard! I sawed it up into one-foot pieces, and burned it in my back yard.
Fu*k everybody.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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