Meiosis (mei-o’-sis): Reference to something with a name disproportionately lesser than its nature (a kind of litotes). This term is equivalent to tapinosis.
Cod Almighty created the heavens and the earth in seven days and seven nights. Cod Almighty took a rest on day seven and looked in the mirror. “I am not a halibut,” He proclaimed. Nevertheless, he was netted and found himself on the deck of a trawler. He tried to flop over the side before they shoveled him into the refrigerated hold along with his brethren. He failed. He became part of the pile of squirming fish, shiny silver in the gloom of the refrigerated hold. Slapped in the eye by a cold fish tail, and sliding deeper into the panicked pile, he thought, “I am Cod, I created all of this. It is not supposed to be like this. It is supposed to be a good world, filled with peace, love, and happiness, not a wild world filled with war, hatred, and clinically depressed humans: the clam mourns the depredation of its richly scented mud flats, the elderly man lives in a cardboard box, the lobster—consider the lobster—cramped in a supermarket tank, waiting to be boiled, cracked open, and eaten.”
Cod decided to make it right. He would remake the world, and recreate it right—universally brimming over with love, peace, and happiness. He closed his eyes and imagined the world he hoped for. Nothing happened, except he sank deeper into the fish pile. Then, he thought there may be other Cods and Coddesses in the pile who envisioned what he envisioned. He cried out. There was no answer. The pile was closing in, almost crushing him with its increasing weight. Then, He remembered he was omnipotent. Because of this insight, He thought, “I can reestablish myself as Cod,” and shimmied His way to the top of the pile, shot out of the hold, flopped across the deck and dove deep into the sea, where He was netted by another trawler and dumped into its hold. “Cod-damnit!” He cried, bubbling at the mouth. One of the hold’s shovelers looked at Him and asked “Did you just swear?” “Yes!” He cried, “Things are not the way they’re supposed to be.” The shoveler threw Cod in a corner and covered Him with a tarp. He told Him he got to keep one “catch” from each fishing trip & he was keeping Cod. When they got back to the Harbor, he took Cod in the tarp to the Fisher of Men Study Center. Cod rode in the back of the shoveler’s pickup truck flopping with joy. The Lab scientists put Cod in a beautiful tank. It was small, but comfortable. Cod told them He was grateful, but that “I am Cod Almighty and something got totally screwed up after I made the heavens and the earth.” The scientists looked sympathetic, and one of them offered to help Cod “sort things out.”
Now, Cod tells us: “I work when I can for the Study Center, dictating my memoirs to the scientist sitting on the rock at the end of my tank, where it is very foggy most of the time. Every once-in-awhile I hear somebody say, ‘Focus mister Bender, it’s time for your medication’ and a human hand pokes through the fog and feeds me a little blue pellet. I think there is a shark in the tank next to mine. I can’t see him, but he makes me nervous.”
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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