Category Archives: allegory

Allegory (al’-le-go-ry): A sustained metaphor continued through whole sentences or even through a whole discourse.

Some made loud cheers. Some made soft cheers. Some made long cheers. Some made short cheers.

It was a megaphone—an old-fashioned amplifier predating the bullhorn. It filled the air with a waste of sound. They were juggled. They were aimed. They were directed, spewing sound to the hills and flatlands and everything in-between. Everything was important. Everything needed amplification, but especially cheers to motivate the masses: Rah Rah! Hooray! Yippee! Hey Hey! Huzza Huzza! Go, go, go!

Some made loud cheers. Some made soft cheers, but everybody made cheers. It didn’t matter whatever the cheers were for. It was the tone that mattered. The way they sounded were considered as separate from what they said. It was hard keeping up with conversations. The meaning of what people said was eclipsed by how they said it. No body cared. Listeners were striving for “sensitivity,” the holy grail of human connectedness. “I hear you man.” Words themselves were considered secondary in the construal meaning. It was tone, tone, tone.

I told my wife I loved her and she told me how insensitive I was. The regime of the megaphone had reached into the 21st century. People were beginning to trade speech for tone. In order to project more “tone,” conversation had become a talking operetta. Some people were able to conjure impromptu doggerel: “Let’s go swimming in the pond, of that I’m very fond.” Or, “Let’s go to Wendy’s for dinner. It is always a winner.” If you liked what you heard you would quietly hum, “That gave me a toner,” no matter what your gender. It was looney. It was babble.

At this point, I started the “Plain Prose Movement.” My wife called me a “callous raccoon” and told me to “fly to the moon.” Typical “Toner” bullshit. I hummed “eat me weasel breath” in her face. It gave her a toner, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t watch while she mooed and twirled a dishrag over her head with one hand and held her megaphone high with the other.

I couldn’t gather a critical mass of people to create the movement. They didn’t understand me. Not one. So, all alone, I stood on a street corner chanting “Words speak louder than actions,” and “Say it, don’t spray if.” I was ridiculed and abridged dictionaries were frequently thrown at me. I had two mild concussions. After an attempt they made at “publishing” me, I gave up the “Plain Prose Movement.” I was rescued by a blind person who covered me in braille and gave me a red-tipped cane that had “Truth” carved on it.

Now I hear they’re writing a “Toner” translation of the Bible. I think the end of the world is at hand and nobody else does. Well, all I can say is “They ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie.”

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

The Daily Trope is available in an early edition 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.

Allegory (al’-le-go-ry): A sustained metaphor continued through whole sentences or even through a whole discourse.

When I woke up I was a butterfly. When I went to sleep I was a butterfly. I’m always a butterfly. I flutter. I flit. I have intricate colorful patterns on my wings. I slurp nectar in the morning. I am chased by birds. Somebody always wants to catch me, chloroform me and pin me down, displayed as an example of my kind. Maybe I am beautiful. Maybe I’m not so beautiful—especially when I’m a young fat caterpillar: bird food recently born from a hanging cocoon.

But, I’m always a butterfly, whether I crawl or fly—inside I am a butterfly, no matter what you see. It all goes so fast from egg to winged, to migration to return, to breed, to become tattered and ragged, to fall to the ground to be eaten by ants. The cycles are inevitable. They can only be thwarted by predation, or some kind of terminal malady. Sometimes I wish I lived a more dangerous life—a life routinely cut short by violence. Not long, drawn-out waiting for night to close in, for sunset to expire, and night to close the door.

But time and its consequences are unstoppable, except maybe by the occasional replacement part—a joint, an antenna, even an eye. They are good. They are welcome—they return you to your past, thwarting time with welcome patches. However temporary, they make you whole again, almost resurrected like an angel on Judgement Day. You flutter again. You flit again. You may feel eternal.

I could never think these thoughts fifty years ago when I was a tiger. Lithe. Handsome. Strong. Fearless. Unconscious of my own mortality. Swatting at butterflies as they flitted by, taunting me with their zig-zag trajectories.

Now, of course, I think of time—how much time I’ve had and will have in my ragged fragile state. But, I am not ready to leave this incarnation. In a way, my tenacity slows down time. It prolongs my life. The only problem with this is memory. There is horror. It drifts into my consciousness unsummoned— like a telemarketer that you can’t hang up on, maybe lodged for days, maybe not shutting up, maybe needing medication to chase away. Then there’s love: if reciprocated, the strongest life-magnet of all. My wife. My daughter. Pure, undiluted love. The greatest blessing. A fountain of hope. The light at the end of the tunnel.

Definition 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.