Thesaurus Rex

Prosopopoeia -
(pra-sew-poe-pea-uh) - a figure of speech in which an absent or dead or imaginary person or character is speaking; personification.

Thesaurus Rex, pictured at the right, has been trying to comprehend another gargantuan beast: the English language. So without further adieu, and before he becomes extinct, won't you please welcome our guest blogger for this Blog-lecture, Thesaurus Rex.

Thank you, Hale. Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Before I start, I'd like to let you know that all of you are welcome to my room for refreshments after the lecture. I'd love to have each of you for dinner.

Your English language is crazy! Take the weather for example. How can it be hot as hell one day and cold as hell the next? Think about it, there is no butter in buttermilk, no egg in eggplant, no grape in grapefruit. There are neither worms nor wood in wormwood, neither pine nor apple in pineapple, and there is no ham in hamburger!

Why is it that when the sun, moon or stars are out, they are visible, and yet when the lights are out they are invisible? Why is that if you wind up your watches, you start them, but when I wind up this lecture, I will end it? If button and unbutton are opposites, why are loosen and unloosen the same?

I swear, if that meteor hadn't wiped out my fellow Saurians sixty-five million years ago, surely trying to learn your English would have caused our mass extinction. You need to look at it from my point of view, I think you English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.

It drives me crazy that you people recite at a play and play at a recital. If my arms weren't so short, you'd see me scratching my head when I hear that you drive on a parkway, but park in a driveway! Why is that you must first chop a tree down before you can chop it up? You fill in a form by filling out a form, now how crazy sounding is that?

If those examples that I have cited so far aren't enough to confuse the peanut-sized brain of a simple carnivore like myself, you throw oxymorons at me! Do you realize that the word 'oxymoron' is an oxymoron itself. It's formed from two Greek roots: oxys - 'sharp and keen'; and moros - 'foolish.' I'll cite a few like: plastic silverware, freezer burn, old news, jumbo shrimp, living end, recorded live, etc. I ask you, how is that you mammals have survived this long?

In closing, I'll leave you this thought: "Who named one of this planet's creatures a titmouse? It is no rodent and it has no mammaries!"

Thank you, Thesaraus Rex for that thought provoking dissertation. There will be no snacking on the audience! Those of you in the front row - Look out! Ouch, that's gotta smart! Who's going to clean up that mess? Why are you looking at me like that? I'm just skin and bones......

(Some of the above is excerpted from the book "Crazy English" by Richard Lederer.)

No.741