Mesarchia (mes-ar’-chi-a): The repetition of the same word or words at the beginning and middle of successive sentences.
“Joy will pleasure make. Joy will pleasure take. Joy is fleeting and takes pleasure with it when it goes.” Parnell Pack.
Pack was a 19th century poet/philosopher. His works uniformly stink, but they are still read by young writers as a rite of passage toward earning an MFA. They want to learn to say bad things about other’s writing and Pack is a great model of bad writing that they can easily cast aspersions on. It is sort of disgraceful, but that’s how you easily learn critical analysis, which is solely about fault finding. The easier the target, the better the critique. This goes for people too. Get in a relationship with an idiot and the door to endless belittlement opens wide. You bask in the inferiority of your partner, achieving a level of superiority for yourself that only a relationship with a total dolt can achieve. Congratulations.
Then there was Bartholomew Canon. He wrote romance novels situated in insane asylums. He wrote the famous line “A crawfish cannot smell worse.” This was uttered by Bertrand Feckless as he crawled across the concrete floor of the asylum’s recreation room. He thought he was a dog trained to hunt crustaceans. His lover, Pony Rutledge, was sitting in a rocking chair across the room unimpressed. She was feverishly crocheting a butter dish for the Matron’s dining room table. This was not therapy. It was an attempt to win the Matron’s favor. She had tried once already and failed. She had failed when had made a floor mat for the Matron’s pickup truck. Foolishly, she had woven it out of strips of newspaper and it disintegrated the instant the Matron’s wet boot touched it.
Bartholomew and Pony were due to be married soon. People said it was illegal, but they went ahead and planned. They had already gotten in trouble for throwing rice at each other and making a mess of the recreation room. Then, the state of Louisiana told them they could get married as long as Pony was sterilized and Bartholomew was castrated.
So, you can imagine how this ham-fisted piece of garbage writing turns out. Oh? You can’t?
They get married and adopt a duck. They named the duck Quacky and taught it to smoke cigarettes. The duck became a chain smoker, rapidly contracting emphysema, and coughing, drowns in the duck pond.
Very sad. Very trite. Almost funny.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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