Category Archives: bdelygmia

Bdelygmia (del-ig’-mi-a): Expressing hatred and abhorrence of a person, word, or deed.

It made me sick watching him scratch his dog behind the ears. It was a boar hound, bred to kill or be killed. So far, Pluto had killed 55 boars. He was vicious and his collar was stained with blood. His previous owner, Marlon Spoon, had died from an infected wound on his leg. A boar had grazed him in the ring in a bout at “Imperial Boar Fights,” held every Friday night at the YMCA. It was a tradition in our small town of Boardale, named after the hoards of boars that populated the woods and fields around our little town.

Like I said, every Friday there was a boar vs. human fight at the “Y.” The tradition had begun after WW II when troops returning from the Philippines brought the sport home. Then, our town was named Lilly Dale. It was a kind and gentle place to live. Everybody went to church and liked strawberry ice cream. Then, the troops came home, bringing their short-haired pet boars with their curled tusks and curled tails. It was only a matter of time before the troops started keeping pig dogs and fighting them against boars imported from the Philippines. Half of the boars escaped and engaged in a mating frenzy that drove the population through the roof.

Dogs became passé as boar fighters and people became the boars’ opponents. The boars would go snorting down the sidewalk waving their tusks at pedestrians. That’s when the “Imperial Boar Fights” began. For some reason, people thought they could significantly reduce the boar population by slaughtering them in the ring. Professional boar fighters would do the honors. They would go into the ring with 50 boars at a time that had been trapped that morning. Each boar fighter had a razor-sharp meat cleaver in each hand and would chop up the 50 boars. The boars didn’t have a chance. Their remains were barbecued and fed to poor people.

It was working out until a boar that was named “Choo-Choo” showed up. He was as big as a locomotive. A cleaver couldn’t penetrate his skin. The professional pig fighters started resigning left and right. Choo-Choo showed no mercy. His foot-long tusks put the meat-cleavers to shame. People started calling for peace, and after a series of meetings at the YMCA, peace was proclaimed.

As a matter of population control. The mature boars agreed to have a set number of sucklings made into hot dogs and capicola. In return, the people agreed to feed them boar food and dig and maintain mud pits throughout the woods and fields for their pleasure.

Personally, I hate what they’ve done. All the boars could’ve been wiped out with a few well-targeted drone attacks. On the other hand though, the boar-meat hotdogs are delicious—perfect for family gatherings. And the capicola is like mana from heaven in a Muffuletta or on pizza.

Definitions 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.

Bdelygmia (del-ig’-mi-a): Expressing hatred and abhorrence of a person, word, or deed.

I hated people who spoke English with a Canadian accent. There is an insidious motive behind it. We all know regional accents are learned and signify solidarity with agendas requiring unity.

My name is Bill Jeffers and I spent my adult life as a CIA agent stationed in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The station was located in the basement of a Tim Horton’s near the University of Toronto, a hotbed of Pro-Canadian activism. For example, most students drank a shot of maple syrup daily and would dress as Mounties on the weekend when they went ice-skating, mostly with their intramural hockey teams with names like “The North Americans,” “The Invaders,” and “Canada First.”

Part of our mission was to recruit native speakers of Canadian to learn to affect an American accent and model it along the border, and slowly Americanize the border residents’ speech, and eventually, teach them to ridicule the Canadian accent and build a movement assuring American hegemony along a 3000-mile language corridor, if you will, between the US and Canada, dominated by the American accent. It would be Canadian in name only.

In order for me to operate and infiltrate effectively, I had to affect a Canadian accent. It was difficult at first to give up my American accent—so much that I loved and all that was decent in the world—is expressed by that accent in all its manifestations from “you all” to “U-Haul.” I was becoming Canadian.

I started eating poutine, nanaimo bars, Montreal smoked meat, peameal bacon, and many more Canadian foods. I felt these dishes moving through my bloodstream, “Canadianizing” me as I digested. My craving for poutine washed down by two or three Molsons was driving me me into the arms of the Canadians. My colleagues back at the station didn’t suspect a thing. I struggled to talk American when I was there. I reached a point where talking American was just too difficult, since I went full Canadian. My colleagues didn’t mind, seeing the accent as a part of the job.

My Canadian accent was like an infection that had killed my American identity—I hated it, but it was part of my job to be Canadian and gain Canadians’ trust as I introduced them to my American-speaking operatives so they could infiltrate their communities and Americanize them.

When looked in the mirror I hated the Canadian I saw. But once you’ve become Canadian, as I found out, there’s no going back. I knew my mission would fail. The Canadian ethos was like a beaver trap crushing my soul, squeezing the New York out of me.

Then, I met a Canadian woman named Tess. We got very close. Then, one night after too many Black Velvet sours, I told her my secret. She laughed and told me I was as Canadian as they come. “Have you ever considered working for the Canadian government?” She asked. “What would I do?” I asked. She told me she didn’t know, but we could talk to “somebody” tomorrow. the woman I loved was a Canadian agent. She worked for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. I loved her. I could not be redeemed.

I resigned from CIA. I went to work south of the border for the Canadian government “Canadianizing” Americans. My base of operations is Buffalo, NY. There are many easy marks there—I start with a bottle of Molson and go from there. After two or three Molsons, they turn: they start saying “aboot” instead of about. We go out to my car and I teach them the Canadian national anthem and give them 100 Canadian dollars. After ten or twelve sessions they turn completely Canadian.

As a traitor, I still hate my Canadian accent, but at the same time, I don’t hate Tess. We’re having poutine again for dinner tonight. Her love assuages my self loathing. How aboot that Yank?

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

The 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.

Bdelygmia (del-ig’-mi-a): Expressing hatred and abhorrence of a person, word, or deed.

I hate Santa Claus. I hate the Easter Bunny. I hate Cupid. I hate the Tooth Fairy. I hate them all from the drunken “Ho, Ho, Ho!” to the tinkling bells and the hands rummaging around under my pillow—waking me up in the middle of the night to leave me a dime—a stinking dime after my father pulled out my tooth with a pair of pliers, because he got sick of waiting for it to fall out on its own. I bled all over my pillow and flushed my dime down the toilet.

Then there’s Santa in his big fake red suit, with a giant white beard made of acrylic. A complete hoax. I had to sit on his lap and tell him what I wanted for Christmas. I was so nervous I peed all over him. He yelled “Goddamn you, you little shit—what, do I look like a f***ing urinal?” Then he shoved me onto the floor and pushed me away with his foot. He threw a candy cane at me as I crawled toward the door and yelled “Get out of my house dickhead and never come back, or if you do, wear a diaper!”

Then there was the Easter Egg hunt. We held it in the back yard. I couldn’t wait to find a couple of eggs. I loved to peel them and sprinkle on a little salt. It was fun dying them too, but this year for some reason, my father took over the dying. I wasn’t even allowed to watch. I looked for eggs for two hours and couldn’t find any. Our yard was small, so basically, I covered every inch of it. I was confused.

My dad walked up to me with an egg and handed it to me: “Here. You’ve learned your lesson, Chip. I read an article in “Mental Illness” magazine about how dashing our children’s expectations prepares them for the rigors of life and the vale of disappointments it consists of—where happiness is fleeting and depression is the norm.” I was 6 years old and his “lesson” has scared me for life. I mistrust everybody and cry a lot.

Cupid! Spawn on the Devil, lording it over Valentine’s Day—with the wimpy heart candies inscribed with asinine sayings suited for saps and idiots—low-level puns and sappy cliches: “Way 2 Go” sounds like something somebody in a coma would say if they could speak. Then there were the cards—the goddamn cards. The only one I ever got was from my teacher, after I stayed up late making them for my classmates. My teacher took me aside and told me she liked me a lot, and maybe, when I turned 18 we could go to the movies together. That would be in 8 years. I thought she was making fun of me, so I demanded my card back. She picked up a pair of pointed scissors and lunged at me. I jumped out of the way and she stumbled over her wastepaper basket and fell on the scissors. She bled to death while the class watched.

The school psychologist found out what my teacher had said to me, and I was put into counselling. It was group counselling. It was one hour of nutsarama per week. I think the other three kids were psychotic and should’ve been taking medication. Elton thought he was a frog and would answer any question with “Ribit.” He had a piece of cardboard shaped like a lily pad that he sat on. Mary would answer “Who the hell do you think you are?” to anything anybody said. Carl would make a gun with his finger and go “Bang!” every five minutes. I had to spend one month meeting with these people because of goddamn Valentine’s Day and my idiot teacher’s accident. What was the result?

I have a name for my illness: Heortophobia (from the Greek heortḗ, “holiday”): fear of holidays. I’ve set up a blog where I pretend to be a psychologist specializing in heortophobia. I give advice like “Change your religion” or “Eat one rabbit every week” or “Take up archery.” The “Tooth Fairy” is a challenge. Technically, it is instrumental in celebrating tooth loss as a right of passage. but what’s a five- or six-year old kid going to do? Suck it up, but demand a higher per-tooth payout!

My greatest success in maneuvering through the hell of my malady is to celebrate holidays from other cultures. I am looking forward to traveling to Sweden in November to celebrate “Gullight Absukte” {Sweet Face) where everybody wears blond wigs and blue contact lenses, juggles little meatballs, and tells jokes about Danish people.

Last, I don’t why, but Thanksgiving doesn’t scare me. Maybe it’s the tryptophan.

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