Aschematiston: The use of plain, unadorned or unornamented language. Or, the unskilled use of figurative language. A vice. [Outside of any particular context of use or sense of its motive, it may be difficult to determine what’s “plain, unadorned or unornamented language.” The same is true of the “unskilled use of figurative language.”]
“Give me a library or give me death.” It is hard to believe that a librarian actually said this. She was 87-year-old Mrs. Mildred Cage. She had been harassing patrons with overdue books for around 60 years and patrolling the library basement’s periodicals section in case “those teenagers were doing more than reading down there.” She made people pay their fines before they were allowed to leave the library. Alfonso, her thug grandson, intimidated them with a raised OED and threats of a fractured skull. 99% of the patrons capitulated, the rest were treated by EMTs on the library’s front steps. If people didn’t have money she made them pay with their jewelry—brooches, wedding rings, cocktail rings, earrings, pearls. Alfonso helped her “collect” and she bribed a judge to rule “it was well within the law” to confiscate goods to pay library fines, and to cover administrative costs.
Then it happened.
A patron saw Mrs. Cage leaving the library with a book without checking it out: she just took it without leaving a record of its withdrawal. In short, she had stolen it! The police obtained a search warrant for her home. When they opened the front door and entered, they were horrified. Mr. Cage was sitting at a table eating a sandwich made from white bread and owner’s manuals for electric appliances and lawnmowers. He said, “Please help me. These are not very nutritious.” But what was worse: the house was filled with books—upstairs, downstairs, the basement. Nearly every surface was stacked high with books. A cursory look established that the books were stolen from the town library—including a first edition of Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship, a signed copy of Porky Pig Sells Mousetraps, and a leather-bound edition of Herbert Hoover’s Freedom Betrayed. There were probably 100s of additional valuable books stolen by Mrs. Cage over the years.
Mrs. Cage was arrested, tried and convicted of robbery. She was sentenced to 100 years for her crimes. Ironically, she was put in charge of the prison library. The prison library had only 12 books. She complained to no avail. Soon, all the books went missing. Given her crime, you would think that Mrs. Cage would be the primary suspect in what looked like the books’ theft. But she wasn’t, due to a massive oversight.
The mystery remained, until a routine search for prison contraband found the stolen books under Mrs. Cage’s mattress. She was deemed incorrigible and was thrown into the hole, serving the remainder of her sentence in solitary confinement. She had one naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. By the kindness of the warden, she was given an L.L Bean Catalogue to pass the time reading.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.
The Daily Trope 