After I over-indulged in slang in a certain post, the assertion was advanced that I would need a real display of fancy lexical footwork to regain those heights of respect that I had formerly enjoyed. I took it as a challenge, and came up with this little piece. It's all style and no substance, but it was fun to put together.
[Home | Obiter Scripta | Book Log ]
Do I look like some callipygian paphian, trolling the mean streets of Usenet for an idoneous benefactor with whom to transact my meretricious commerce? Am I no more than a temerarious trollop, a lexical hetæra manqué, peddling the paltry gems of my humble but hard-won vocabulary, daily risking the casual escharotic peripeteia of such a life--not least of which is the humiliation of the unintended catachresis--and receiving in return, not that solid fungible specie that is the condign expectation of even the lumpen proletariat, but rather a Barmecidal and no doubt aleatory portion of 'respect' as my wages? Am I so needy of affirmation--craving a reputation for dignified gravitas as a dipsomaniac craves his evening potation--that, failing all else, I will slaver after the merest rebarbative pis aller so long as he will sprinkle sweet lenitive drops of symbolic caudle on my soul-sickened and spiritually bankrupt psychic palate?
Nay, sir. A thousand times nay. I am not such a moral valetudinarian, bereft of any hint of a normative cynosure. I am an eidolon of integrity, and as I sail my doughty barque across the thalassic depths of this life, my gaze is lifted to the chatoyant corposant that brightens the empyrean, not fixed on those beckoning ports that promise all the delights of a fescennine dithyramb, and upon occasion tempt the ethically otiose to rouse from their self-induced hebetude and pursue a parlous track to their ultimate ruin. Neither undeserved obloquy nor unsolicited truckling can disturb my arcadian mansuetude, and the only meed I want or require is that gentle ataraxia attendant to a sure awareness that thought, code, and deed are in as close an approach to perfect harmony as is possible for one inherently imperfect.
[Home | Obiter Scripta | Book Log | e-mail]