Anacoluthon (an-a-co-lu’-thon): A grammatical interruption or lack of implied sequence within a sentence. That is, beginning a sentence in a way that implies a certain logical resolution, but concluding it differently than the grammar leads one to expect. Anacoluthon can be either a grammatical fault or a stylistic virtue, depending on its use. In either case, it is an interruption or a verbal lack of symmetry. Anacoluthon is characteristic of spoken language or interior thought, and thus suggests those domains when it occurs in writing.
I was blast—a proper loser. I had misplaced my car keys again. I started pushing my car to work. It would take awhile, but at least nobody would know I had lost my keys. My car would be parked in its designated slot at “Singing Frog Law Firm, LLP.” We did mainly environmental law—saving Pug-Nosed Whales, Giant Himalayan Weevils, Stool Bots, Five-Legged Loam Flies, Nail Worms, Creeping Tongue Grippers, Steaming Leeches, etc. These are a few of our successes. Currently, we are working our way through the courts trying to get citizenship for Japanese Beetles. Gardeners are presenting what seems to be an unbreachable wall of argument against the beetles—especially the moral argument. Their public mating rituals offend most sane people. But where else can they go? Your bedroom or your hollyhocks?
Anyway, I felt an irritation in my underpants. I went in the men’s room and pulled down my pants expecting to find Larry Lizard—my pet lizard—in my underpants—he likes it there—nice and warm. But it wasn’t Larry. It was my car keys! I was elated. I didn’t remember putting them there, but I was thinking it was my wife’s doing. She liked to keep things lively and frequently played jokes on me. Last week she put sand in my scrambled eggs. The week before that, she talked me into wearing a flower pot for a hat and saying “Whip it good” to my colleagues.
I drove home from work without incident. When I got home, my house was on fire. It was smoking and fire was coming out of the windows. My wife was on fire too. She had not stopped, dropped, or rolled. I thought, “Fu*k it” and let her burn. All I could think of was living prank-free. To my chagrin, one of the firefighters hosed down my wife and she was alive. She recovered after many skin grafts and antibiotics and lots of morphine.
This morning I couldn’t find my shoes. I had to wear my Porky Pig slippers to work. I am planning on putting a highly poisonous, and endangered, Osmosis Beetle in my wife’s underwear drawer. One bite when she reaches for her panties and she’ll collapse dead on the floor.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu.
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