Tricolon

Tricolon (tri-co-lon): Three parallel elements of the same length occurring together in a series.

I could be tough. I could be rough. I could be janky. Since nobody knows what janky is, I could get away with being janky all the time. Since I’m switching over to a more obscure and more enjoyable character attribute, I will reveal the meaning of janky as it compliments being tough and rough.

Janky can mean junky—like cheap shit crap. As a character attribute, it’s close to lanky and rhymes with it. Lanky Janky, or janky lanky. Being janky, you can see yourself as one of those stuffed animals you can win at the county fair—maybe a Goofy doll. He’s lanky, and Janky. Or maybe you be cranky janky. That would push you toward tough and rough. Your anger would obscure your janky hood, keeping it obscured and passing for something other than junk, the goal of all junk. Or jankyhood. You sort of adopt the ethos of a used car salesperson—always, all the time, with everything. You begin every interaction with “Have I got a deal for you!” Then you sell yourself as a really valuable piece of jank. You talk about your heritage, your education, your height and weight, the car you drive, and your job as a busboy at a really expensive restaurant: that’s biggest piece of junk that you’ve got to offer. If you pitch it right you’ll have a Janky’s dream: pity. If the person you’re talking to says “You poor bastard,” you have hit the jackpot, the whole purpose for being janky: pity! As you revel in the pity, you realize you’ve found your place in the social matrix: the bottom, the landfill, the garbage heap. Relax on a worn-out seat cushion and cook those potato peels on a stick over the fire in the cracked sink you found.

But that’s not all. There’s more to janky than junky.

It also means faulty or functioning improperly. There’s a lot of room to encompass the human condition in “faulty.” Being faulty is a sumptuous luxury. Being known as faulty, you can get away with almost anything. The rallying cry “I’m faulty” will prove to be a baseline excuse for just about every personal failure, from being late to running over your wife in your driveway and killing her. No matter what ulterior motive you may have had “I’m faulty” will see you through.

POSTSCRIPT

We read this paper several times and can’t really tell what its point is. We think it may be something like the power that adjectives have to determine our lives. Once you’ve accepted an attribution and the adjective enmeshes you, you become the adjective. But, attribution isn’t essence. For example, no matter how much you want to be called “honest,” as a virtue, being honest can be evil. Honesty can hurt peoples’ feelings and even get them killed. Right?

Your being is a constantly rotating kaleidoscope of conflicting points of view. Life makes it rotate. We all live on a fault line, waiting for the BIG ONE.

Just get used to it.

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

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