Abbaser [George] Puttenham’s English term for tapinosis. Also equivalent to meiosis: reference to something with a name disproportionately lesser than its nature (a kind of litotes: deliberate understatement, especially when expressing a thought by denying its opposite)
“That cow is no weasel. That boiling kettle is no tray of ice cubes. You knew when you married me that I’m no faithful Boring Bob.” I was leading up to the end, from the weasel to Bob. We’d been married for two weeks and already I wanted out. Why?
She was irresponsible. She bought a used Toyota with our credit card. We had sworn to use bicycles for transportation. She complained because her job at the “Twirly” yo-yo factory was five miles from where we lived. What a joke. My job at the “Blessed Light” candle factory was 32 miles. I left for work at 3:00 a.m. every morning. I was only late once in my entire career. I had a sneezing fit on my bike and veered over a cliff. It was a fifty-foot drop. I broke my wrist.
Now that she’s in open rebellion with the Toyota, I’ve got to get her out of my life. If she won’t go gently, I’ll have to push her, and push her hard. I’m a man. She’s a woman. Get it?
I told her I was leaving. She asked me what had taken me so long, as if two weeks was a year, or something. I told her that initially I hadn’t seen how bossy she is and unwilling to follow most of my orders. I told her to paint our house. She said “No.” I told her to build bookcases in the living room. She said “No.” I told her to go kill us a deer for dinner. She said “No.” The list goes on. The tipping point was when she refused to watch my favorite TV show—“Gerry: Red Wing Goalie.” It is the most popular TV show here in Canada and it is on every night. It follows Gerry—his injuries, his battles with his seven former wives and his run ins with the Mounties for drunkenness, shoplifting, and murder. My favorite episode was when Gerry got dental implants. They showed the whole operation, right down to screwing in Gerry’s new teeth!
So, I sat there alone on the couch, cursing my wife in my head. She came down the stairs with two suitcases. She told me she was going to Joe’s. She said marrying me was a gigantic mistake, that she had loved Joe all along. It wouldn’t have been so bad if Joe wasn’t my older brother. He had been doing stuff like this to me all our lives. It started with him stealing my turtle, Perky. Now, he was stealing my wife, Lynette.
I got a lawyer. We couldn’t find any dirt oh her to establish infidelity as the grounds of divorce and save me a lot of money. But I was a different story. I’m in a video on the internet that is legend after only a week. It has over 1,000,000 hits. Without going into detail, I’m under a pile of 27 naked women singing “Are you lonesome tonight?” Since I got paid to do it, I don’t consider it infidelity, but I was married at the time, so there may be a problem.
Well, “Gerry: Red Wing Goalie” is coming on in five minutes. Tonight, he gets impaled on a hockey stick.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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