Antimetathesis

Antimetathesis (an-ti-me-ta’-the-sis): Inversion of the members of an antithesis.

“Over and under, under and over, aim right, and shoot the fleeing Plover.” This was my family’s motto inscribed in Latin on all the walls of our family’s castle. The castle is adjacent to Inverness, Scotland on the River Ness—maybe the shortest river in the world. It empties into Loch Ness.

Long ago, we stopped paying attention to the motto. It’s significance was lost in the mists of time, It was deemed stupid. How could it bear witness to our family’s character or provide wisdom to negotiate life’s travails?

Consequently, my father the Duke of Earl, was going to have the motto removed from all the castle’s walls and replaced with a new motto authored by his friend who wrote Rock music. His most famous song was “Don’t Fear the Leper.” It had religious overtones and I never really liked it, except the line “Baby here’s my hand, don’t fear the leper, bag it up because I’m your man.” It was performed by “Blue Duster Rag,” and sold millions of copies and led to a leprosy outbreak in northern England.

I got the idea that before we erase it away, we should do some research on the motto’s origins and meaning. I found out the motto was probably coined in the 1800s when Plovers were mercilessly blown out of the sky to near extinction. Piles of Plovers would be left in fields and alongside creek beds and roadsides by the bloodthirsty bird killers. Their bounty wasn’t donated to the poor, rather, it became fox food for fattening foxes for the gentry’s hunt, slowing the foxes down for easy killing by the hounds.

I was dumbfounded. How could a reference to such a ghastly wasteful practice become a motto for anything but a family of cowardly sadists? With that thought, things started coming together. Now I understood why there was a rack in the basement. My father promised me he would show me how to work it when I turned 21. When we were talking about it, the maid serving us drinks blushed. I thought nothing of it at the time, but now that I am older, I get it.

Now, I urgently desired to change the motto. The songwriter friend hadn’t come up with anything, so I put my creative abilities to work. I tried “Stretching the Truth” but that was a little too close to revealing the basement rack’s existence, so I chucked it. After a week, I came up with “Pleasure Hurts. Pain Heals.” It resonated with our family’s grisly past, metaphorically, and ignoring the rack in the basement, it did not link to sadomasochistic practices, but rather, to praiseworthy monastic practices like self-flagellation or wearing itchy underpants.

Nobody liked my motto. They said it veered too close to the truth. We went with “What’s In Your Sporran?” sort of stealing from Capital One’s “What’s in your wallet?” As a motto, it’s just as useless as the old one. It’s crass—instead of asking “What is in your soul” or “What’s in your conscience?” it asks about the contents of your purse—a ploy to make bragging about the Earl family’s wealth relevant. Disgusting.

In the wake of the family motto fiasco, I have coined a motto for myself: “No motto is a good motto.”

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

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