Category Archives: antistasis

Antistasis (an-ti’-sta-sis): The repetition of a word in a contrary sense. Often, simply synonymous with antanaclasis.

I fell on the floor for the third time. It was time for another drink. I pulled myself up and stumbled to the bar with my shot-glass in my hand, it had my name painted on it and it was kept behind the bar for me, where I left it every night.

I met some really nice people on the barroom floor—a catholic priest, a hardware salesman, a millionaire from another town. We would talk in slurred speech about salvation, screwdrivers, and fine art. The millionaire thought art was the end of human existence, judging by some it, I concluded it was the end of human existence too, but not like he meant it!

I was a discount surgeon working at Costco, so I would add cutting and stitching to the conversation.

My surgical abilities were beginning to fail given my nightly regime of excessive drinking. I had not made any big mistakes yet, but it was just a matter of time. Time was not on my side.

I lived in a tiny apartment with no room—but I would tell myself that at least it was my room. When I woke up in the morning I had to struggle to remember where I was—I felt like a truck ran over my head and had crushed it like a melon. The juice on the floor was urine, and I was due at the operating room at eleven. That was three hours away. I was still drunk, and was grateful for the bar’s liberality, letting me meet with my friends on the floor. But I guess I took too much advantage of it.

I thought about hiring a stand-in, but Costco did not allow that. Luckily the surgery I was performing was extremely minor. A woman had a boil on the back of her neck, My job was to lance it—basically, poke a hole in it with a needle. Aside from the boil squirting in the attending nurse’s eye, everything went well.

I went home, showered and changed my clothes, and was back on the barroom floor by around 9:15, slurring words and conversing with my buddies. The hardware salesman wanted to talk about chicken wire. We all agreed that was a potentially interesting topic. We started talking about ways of unrolling chicken wire and flattening it out.

I got a call from the Costco Medical Center. They told me the woman I had lanced earlier in the day was dead. I told them I figured something like this would happen sooner or later due to my drinking problem.

Evidently, I had shoved the lance in way too far and punctured an artery in her shoulder. She died of internal bleeding, not even knowing she was bleeding.

I was convicted of criminal negligence and sentenced to two years in prison. I ran into my hardware salesman friend the other day. It was great running into my old friend. He’s serving a life sentence for killing his wife with a nail gun.

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.

Antistasis (an-ti’-sta-sis): The repetition of a word in a contrary sense. Often, simply synonymous with antanaclasis.

Time was important, but I felt like I was running out of time. I had fallen down a marble staircase. Despite the fall and the injuries I felt privileged. They were the same stairs Mozart had fallen down after a night of drinking. Unlike me, he had stood up at the bottom of the stairs. He walked up them and composed one of his greatest musical wotks, Don Gionetti. It is about an Italian shoe repairman who is overcome by glue fumes, falls down a flight of stairs, wets his pants, and is bitten by his own dog, Mandrake. While he is sitting holding his bleeding hand, Mandrake runs away, but a woman appears wearing a powdered wig fashioned after a tree trunk with a bird’s nest holding a cheeping sparrow. Don Gionetti reaches out and crushes the bird with his hand. “How annoying your hair is madam,” Gionetti says holding up the dead bird. The woman pushed Gionetti down and his head hit the sharp edge of one of stairs. He groaned and dropped the bird. By some kind of miracle it flew back to its perch in the woman’s hair and began cheeping again.

“I am the Marquess of Bolly-Brooke. You are a drunken dog. I out- rank you by the distance from London to Inverness. You are scum. You are filthy. You smell like a barn housing pigs. Your linens are surely soiled. You are a Rotter, a cut-purse, and a seducer of innocents, like me.”

There is a puff of smoke and Gionetti turns into a well-dressed bearer of a royal comportment. “Come my dear, let’s go to “The Rook and Pawn” for a couple flagons of shandy—my treat!” Gionetti suggested.

Off they went together into the unknowable future, lacking in well-functioning faculties like most people of Royal blood. They woke up together with a third person in the bed. He was very apologetic as he expressed his gratitude for a most memorable evening. Neither Gionetti nor the Marguess remembered him being there, although the Marquess thought he looked a lot like her betrothed, sir Norbert of Sticky Gables. .

Clearly Gionetti and the Marquess are part of the 18th century’s lost generation.

They ate lobster three time a day, along with drinking gallons of shandy and smoking tobacco from clay pipes. Mozart had perfectly captured the ethos of time, doing his best work, a work which was to some extent autobiographic.

I am currently writing a musical play titled “Under the Rug. I won’t provide a synopsis here. Suffice it to say the “carpet” is Persian.

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.