Gnome

Gnome (nome or no’-mee): One of several terms describing short, pithy sayings. Others include adage, apothegm, maxim, paroemia, proverb, and sententia.

“When the fire lights, you will smell the flame.” I have applied this saying to my life for the past 62 years. I had thought I had learned it from the “Whining Monk” I had met when I was selling lightbulbs for the Boy Scouts door to door in my home town of Rahway, New Jersey. I had just finished dealing with a woman wearing only an apron who told me to deal with her dog Frank, named after Frank Sinatra. She said to the dog “Sing Frank.” Frank started making weird whining sounds that sounded like “Strangers in the Night.” I was about to wet my pants when Frank said “2 bulbs.” The lady paid me and I left feeling dizzy with a very small stain on the front of my pants.

My next stop turned out to be the Whining Monk. He opened the door and said in his whiny voice “When the fire lights, you will smell the flame.” The saying almost knocked me over. I had visions of candles the size of the Empire State Building filling New York with the scent of truth, justice and wisdom and the streets were filled with cabs with their “On Duty” lights on joyfully ushering fares into them. It was like Utopia. I started crying and vowed to “follow the scent” for the rest of my life. The Whining Monk bought 4 lightbulbs and wished me well. I felt like his whining voice lifted me to the Empyrean to comport in sublimity with angelic friends.

Then, two days later, I was walking through the mall and saw that my saying—the Whining Monk’s saying—was a saying that Yankee candle used to promote its scented candles.

Initially, I felt swindled, but seeing my saying at Yankee Candle hadn’t changed my resolve to “follow the scent.” I learned that sayings are like veils obscuring, accenting, and displaying their meanings all at the same time. It does not matter why they are cast—people will take them to mean what they need them to mean, or ignore them. Semiosis is a free ride to everywhere your wit and imagination can take you.

“The house of meaning shelters your soul from the chaos of anomie.”

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

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