Acervatio (ak-er-va’-ti-o): Latin term Quintilian employs for both asyndeton (acervatio dissoluta: a loose heap) and polysyndeton (acervatio iuncta:a conjoined heap).
It was cold, hot, lukewarm, freezing, and like “A Tale of Two Cities,” “It was the best of times and the worst of times.” In some place it had become permanent summer, in other places, permanent fall. The seasons were stalled just like Al Gore had said they would. It was like the dust bowl with benefits. I guarded my little garden with my Doberman Lucille and a .20 gauge pump shotgun. I hadn’t had to use it yet. I think it was Lucille’s fangs and growling that kept me covered. Due to the weather, the rabbit population had skyrocketed. My cousin Jim had been attacked by a pack of hungry rabbits. He estimated there were 20 or 30 that tried to raid his garden. He had installed a “Flaming Rabbit” fence. It had a trip-wire that turned on the juice with a timer that fried the rabbits when they hit the fence. Jim picked up the half-cooked rabbits and made them into rabbit stew, and fried battered rabbit, and roasted rabbit, and rabbit burgers. He was writing a rabbit cookbook titled “Bunny for Breakfast,” It consisted of recipes that included fried, and scrambled, and poached egg recipes for rabbit breakfast dishes. There are also interesting toast recipes using different kinds of bread: white, rye, Italian, French, raison, cinnamon, sour dough.
Also, Jim had learned how to tan rabbit furs. Jim made a variety of goods from rabbit fur. He sort of found his artistic bliss making slippers, muffs, and hats. My favorite are the hats. The bunny ears and bunny face are kept intact. He cures the faces so the bunny-lips are curled and you can see the little yellow teeth. The eyes are replaced by glow-in-the dark buttons. On a moonless night they look really cool from a distance bobbing up and down when you walk. And, of course, the hats have a little cotton tail stitched to the back. They are called simply “Bunny Hat” and are incredibly popular. Jim works day and night on the hats. He’s getting rich.
I’ve been trying to think of a way to profit from climate change before the world ends. I want to leave this “vale of tears” with some money in my pocket. First off, I considered a pet school for rabbits. I would train them and sell them to kids as pets. They started multiplying and burst out of the giant pen I had built. They herded up and wreaked havoc on every piece of vegetation within 100 miles. They figured out a way to breach the “Flaming Rabbit Fences” by literally laying down their lives so their brothers and sisters could walk over them. I was fined $5,000 for harboring marauding rabbits. I also received 2 months community service picking up rabbit droppings. That’s when I got my big idea: rabbit dropping fertilizer. I talked my fellow workers into dumping their droppings into my pickup truck at the end of each day. I’d drive then home and bag them up. I named them “Leaping Lepus Leavings” and sold them at the weekly farmer’s market.
Everything was going fine, except for one thing: the was a women in the group who refused to give me her pellets. She told me she would rather eat them than give them to me. I asked her why. She said she couldn’t bear knowing a man as promising as me who made living “selling rabbit shit.” We locked eyes and she dumped her bag of rabbit pellets into my truck. She started to cry and told me she wanted to go up in flames with me at the end of the world. This came out of nowhere. I could see us burning together in a beam of fatal sunlight. I should’ve asked her then why she was doing community service, but I was so overwhelmed I took a leap into the abyss and asked her to marry me. She said “yes” and that’s when she told me her name, it was Sherona O’ Sherona. Then I remembered, she was famous for holding her dress over head outside the Presbyterian Church after Sunday services. I had just asked her to marry me. She said her dress lifting thing was a desperate cry for help. “A cry for help with what?” I asked. She said, “My laundry. My washing machine had broken and I couldn’t afford the laundromat.”
“Wow! That’s really obtuse,” I said. “Yes, but I took my laundry to jail with me and washed it there—in the jail laundry for free. Will you still marry me?” Sage asked. I told he I would and we embraced. She is a smart woman. Our son Buzz is smart too. The world will be ending soon. We should’ve listened to Al Gore.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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