Daily Archives: January 8, 2026

Onomatopoeia (on-o-mat-o-pee’-a): Using or inventing a word whose sound imitates that which it names (the union of phonetics and semantics).

My little brother was slurping his tomato soup. It was our lunch. On a cold winter day it warmed us up a little to go out and earn some money shoveling snow. But my little brother’s slurping was making me crazy. I yelled “Cut out the slurping dipshit.” My mother put her hand over her mouth and ran out of the kitchen.

My little brother laughed a kept slurping. I lost it. I threw my bowl of soup at him hoping to fracture his skull. I missed, but it shut him up. It hit our cat Manny pretty hard when it landed on the floor. He was unconscious for 2 or 3 seconds and woke up and started licking the soup off his fur. The bowl was broken. I put the pieces in a paper bag. I would dump them somewhere when we were snow shoveling.

We got bundled up and went out to the garage to get our shovels. We shoveled our walk and then went off to make our fortune. Our first stop was going to be Mr. Bringle’s. He was really old and had trouble just walking to his mailbox. We would do our usual scam—shovel the walk first and then go to the door and ask for money. It never failed to bring in the bucks. So, we started to shovel Mr. Bringle’s walk. It had snowed around five inches so it was heavy lifting. My little brother was shoveling the porch. I was doing the sidewalk. I got halfway up the walk and hit something like a rock. I brushed off the snow. It was Mr. Bingle! He was frozen solid to the sidewalk in his pajamas. He had a scratch-off lotto ticket in his hand. I “retrieved” it.

It had been scratched off. It had won $5,555.00. I stuck the ticket into my coat pocket and called 911 on my cellphone. We waited for the ambulance and then went “Larry’s Liquors” where lotto tickets are sold and redeemed. When I showed the ticket to Larry he said “Wow. I can’t redeem that—it’s too much money. You have to take it to the Lotto Commission in Albany.”

My mom drove me to Albany. I had my choice of a check or cash. I took cash and was almost out the door when the cashier asked me if I was 18. I said “No. I found the ticket. Finders keepers.” He said “Losers weepers. Ha ha!” Mom laughed too. On the ride home, she said she wanted $2,500.00 to keep her mouth shut.

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

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