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rhetoric

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January 10, 2012

For your enjoyment, each of the following “proverbs” define a rhetorical technique while modeling the technique defined.

To antithesis is human; to simile divine.

Amplification is layer cake, ice cream of two flavors and a cherry on top.

Synecdoche reduces humans to derrières.

To seduce, fashion a style, hyperbatonic.

Aanadiplosis leads to repetitivenes, repetitiveness to bordom, bordom to neglect and neglect to “out of print.

Analogy is the mouse that unchews the bound lion.

Epizeuxis suffers a fancy, fancy, fancy rhetorical stutter.

Aposiopesis leaves it to the  imagination to …

Slam, bam, pow, pop, fizz — onomatopoeia conjures reality.

Litotes triumphs by understabbing the victim.

What  is written chiastically, may be chiastically unwritten.

She calmly talked him off the ledge with epistrophe, after epistrophe,  after epistrophe.

Zeugma flirts, prozeugma courts,  diazeugma dominates and hypozeugma apologizes and bows demurely at the door.

To anaphora, or not to anaphora –  that is the anaphora.

Ton-like lies the line that wears the hyperbole.

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fun

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December 19, 2011

Lies are  boring; the truth is fun.

Seriousness is exhausting, but silliness energizing.

The most fun story opens the most closed mind.

Psyche freedom lies in the bosom of silliness.

Fun is life twisted, warped, bent and mangled just short of beyond-recognition.

Humor truths best.

Most of the time have fun, and the rest of the time have more fun.

Fun occurs most often off-center, kilter, flopping, tripping and falling down.

Laughter washes sad eyes with happy tears.

Guffaw by exaggeration.

If you haven’t made up a new word lately, nicknamed a friend or babbled incoherently to your pets, then you have totally and utterly lost touch with the thrill of creative thriving.

My happiest life-long aim is found in avoiding being dead.

It’s most fun to do what’s possible.

In an aging population, nakedness is frightening, clothes are fun and closed coffins are hilarious.

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education

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December 13, 2011

Knowledge is ever the boss of ignornance.

The most honest, most educate.

We are doomed to repeat what we don’t interpret.

Experience has a lesson for those who avoid it.

Wild dreams spring from boring lessons.

Open a book and learn; open reality and revise.

Realtity morphs into books; books morph under the scrutiny of reality.

Silence distances; lectures unite; actions divide.

Ideas planted in a book turn to grain and then  bread in a teacher’s hands.

Brokeness is a classroom.

 

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stress

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December 4, 2011

Stress is the downside of awareness and the upside of action.

No good is done without stress. Step up, stress out, surge forward.

Strike when the stress is hot.

Injustice stresses what fairness calms.

The birth of Jesus was full of stress, so also the birth of every great thing.

Prestressed concrete is like a person who has been through it — stronger.

Stress kills, apathy.

Stress slowly kills you while it informs  you that you’re still alive.

Stress deploys at home after the war.

When I decide if your crisis is mine,  I determine if your stress is viral or not.

Sleep salves stress.

The stressed irritate the calm, and the calm craze the stressed.

For the irresponsibility of  one, ten pay with stress.

God is not only found in contemplative, peaceful, private moments,  but as Jesus showed us, God  is also found in the stressful experience of poverty, illnesses, loss and brokenness.

Stress narrows focus, but so does calm.

Revisionist history  is academic stress reduction.

Stress is an interpretation.

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dance

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November 21, 2011

Not dancing is sin.

Dancing heals loneliness.

To misstep is better than to nonstep.

Those who never risk being awkward, never enjoy being graceful.

The world would be a better place if we all danced.

The dance floor is one of the few places in the world where a man is always right — or left.

The dance floor is the only place in the world where a man should treat a woman like a shopping cart.

To dance is to make ones soul a drum.

Dance is the public language of the soul.

Living, like dancing, is often awkward before it is graceful.

To dance or live is to  step on a few toes.

More women should dance; where else can they can get a man to be their picture frame?

Men should dance more; it affords such opportunity.

Dance with the stars; buy a telescope.

When we dance, we don’t fight, mostly.

Women were backward, men forward– on the old-fashioned dance floor.

There are fewer lonely dancers than lonely spectators.

The dance floor is a great place for couples to expand their floor plan without a home equity line of credit.

Some thing are best done alone, brushing your teeth, reading, snoring, not dancing.

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beginnings

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November 3, 2011

Rejoice in small beginnings; the first two-ton pumpkin will begin with a seed.

If you want something to happen do nothing and it will.

Beginnings are like guppies; get a couple going and pretty soon you have twenty.

End an ending by beginning a beginning.

End parenting by beginning the marriage again.

If you want to learn from your failures, start a small business.

You can’t “just do it” unless you “just start it.”

After the tsunami we surf, sail and fish again.

The beginning is the fastest way to the end.

The first is in the last, the last in the first.

“In the beginning …”  forsaw the end.

An end is made out of a sequential series of beginnings.

Science is a beginning built on an ending.

Redemption is a dead end that becomes a life-giving beginning.

Be careful what you begin and where you begin it; the roots of the one gallon tree you planted last week may one day crack your sidewwalk.

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environment

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October 31, 2011

The wilderness is a cafe, and the goal is to stay off the plate.

Love earth; love life.

Our planet gets high mark for guest relations, but not the guests.

Coffee good hot; earth not.

The city heals us from the country and the country from the city.

A fanged touch reminds us that all the world is not kin.

A forest is a cathedral; leaf, branch and trunk praise.

The first environment to respect is within.

A star-spangled sky advertizes a healthy earth.

Gardens are safe wildernesses.

Oxygen, hydrogen and carbon form a choir.

Tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes ended romanticism.

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technology

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October 18, 2011

To topple tyrants, tweet.

The family that Skypes together stays together.

Modern living is 700 friends on Facebook and no one to dinner.

Computer hardware comes and goes,  but wisdom’s OS will never be obsolete.

A flat screen is no substitute for a natural scene.

Social networks unite, but old technologies still divide and crush the world –  wheels, walls and bullets.

It is the prerogative of man to perish at the hands of the machines he controls.

Technology may have shrunk the globe to the size of the human ear, but it is compassion that will bring people close enough to hear each other.

The control of fire bookends history; it cooked the first meal and sent the first human being out of the atmosphere.

The smart phone places global knowledge in our pockets, but what we do with that is still up to us.

Machines may extend our bodies and expand our minds, but they may also shrink our souls.

With clicks we can now annihilate eyes we have never seen, but morality will never be vaporized.

Abandon technology may be turning earth and space into a junkyard, but the footprint I leave on the earth is still up to me.

Technology teeters precariously  between making the world better, or worse.

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health

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October 17, 2011

Calm is an anti-accident; take two and go to bed.

Unhealthy emotions follow family commotions, but kindness calms the raging herd.

If I had known I was going to live so long, I’d have taken worse care of myself.

Dying is eventually a healthy choice.

Don’t let bodily functions become your compunctions.

A proverb a day keeps the fool at bay.

A proverb applied is a physician inside.

Late to bed and late to re-engage — healthy, unwealthy, stealthy and teenage.

The ocean is an anti-depressant.

Acceptance is the best analgesic for aging.

It may take a heart attack to begin to live so you won’t have another one.

Colors heal; try the leaves in the fall and the flowers in the spring.

The mountains, deserts, oceans and jungles are in the fine print on your doctor’s prescription.

Health food can  look beautiful but taste dutiful.

Sleep is an antibiotic for stress.

Health is harmony within.

Aging and illness uncover stunning beauty; the frail, aged mother on her daugther’s arm.

Love is health.

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spirituality

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October 13, 2011

Spirituality is never chrome plated.

The most spiritual — don’t know it.

Spirituality exists where broken servants wash the feet of diseased children.

Pseudo-spirituality sets up border checkpoints; authentic spirituality is an open road.

Spirituality isn’t a vague , spooky, subjectve piety; it is a tête-à-tête with God, the most concrete, substantial, specific being in the universe.

Spirituality exists in your next act of compassion.

A holy proximity to unholy people is the signature of spiritual maturity.

It is more spiritual to feed the poor than to attend a potluck at church.

Secular doesn’t exist; everything is spiritual.

Spiritually speaking, losing is winning.

More doors open to the “spiritual” than the Baptists.

Religion is most threatened by its tendancy to spiritualize and justify  hatred and violence.

Work is holy, but overwork ruins the rest of life.

Eating is holy communion.

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endings

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October 11, 2011

It often takes more courage to end a thing than to begin it.

Redemption turns endings into beginnings.

Hard endings may sprout tender beginnings.

The end for one is the beginning for another.

The end of aid may be the beginning of responsiblity.

It may be wise to begin with the end in mind, but it is realistic to end with the end in mind.

We cannot remember precisely when we began, and we cannot begin to know how we will end.

Love is the antitoxin for brutal endings.

At the end of my fingertips is the beginning of you.

Those who love themselves know when to end  a harmful relationship; those who hate themselves keep inviting abuse.

Heaven and hell are not endings; they are beginnings we choose.

In the ending, God creates the possibility of a beginning.

Graciously accepting the end of each day is the grand rehearsal for graciously accepting the end of the last day.

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junk

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October 4, 2011

If you put your junk beside your trash can instead of in it, somebody will steal it.

It is much easier to get rid of your children than their junk.

If you fill up your garage with cars, where will you park your junk?

A garage sale is about taking ownership of the means of reduction.

Mold, rust and dry rot turn one decade’s treasure into another decade’s junk.

Life begins pre-junk, enters mid-junk and ends post-junk.

Craig’s List: how one man’s junk becomes another man’s.

They say that sex sells, but not like junk.

Selling junk is the world’s second, third and fourth oldest professions.

To perfect your prophetic gift, visit land fills and junk yards.

A day can turn a whole city into junk — Otsuchi, Japan.

To understand the end of the world,  visit a junkyard.

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economy

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September 28, 2011

If you don’t like the returns you’ve gotten on stocks, cheer yourself up by investing in jewelry and time shares.

“It’s the economy, stupid,” is now, “It’s the stupid economy.”

All that is needed to inspire another young American to get some credit cards and  max them out is a grade school trip to Washington DC.

Economies morph; we once sold corn, then we sold corn syrup — now we sell corn-powered cars.

An economy occurs as soon as someone wants what someone else has.

The economy is the social network we belong to by default.

A shopper without a price anchor is like a shopper with ten million dollars; both will likely pay too much for too little.

The economy exists within our emotions; anxiety and hope rule the attribution of value.

In an economic recessions the “economy” transmogrifies into a Hydra.

In modern economies records have replaced relationships.

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anxiety

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September 26, 2011

Anxiety puts an end to  fun, but confidence is the life of the party.

Anxiety is a virus; you can catch it from your neighbors.

Anxiety is silent, but relief comes to those who speak up.

One of the best anti-anxiety medications is found in taking charge.

Anxiety oppresses its neighbor, but love hugs and kisses even those far off.

Worry substracts and anxiety divides, but faith adds and love multiplies.

Bravery imagines the worst and then proceeds.

To succeed, do the opposite of what anxiety tells you to do.

Anxiety whispers furiously about dangers that do not exist, but courage and action quiet false reports.

A worry-free life is not a life without risk; it is a life with a gentle, philosophical acceptance of loss and failure.

“You won’t always feel like this,” is wise counsel to the anxious.

Worship and prayer are anti-anxiety medications.

Good walks, good books, good music, good friends and good meals — these are among the good cures for anxious hearts.

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shame

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September 20, 2011

We were made with no shame and we are living to return there again.

The beginning of forgiveness is the end of shame.

Blame shames;understanding values.

I have done wrong, not I am wrong is the truth.

Guilt confesses to a crime; shame believes it is the crime.

Guilt is in the rind; shame is in the core.

Shame has a trigger; everyone who is shamed was once shot.

Fail and feel guilty; be failed and feel shame.

False shame has no father nor mother either, but the ability to blush is human.

Shame thrives in a dark corner but withers among safe friends.

Vulnerablity is shame therapy.

Find shame a place where it is homeless.

To recover from shame is to feel one thing and do the opposite.

Defeat shame by acting valued.

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gentleness

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September 19, 2011

Harshness has a magnifying glass, but gentleness – a  microscope.

Gentleness has nothing to do with gender; it is a matter of genius.

Gentleness comforts the child, nutures the adult and consoles the aged.

Emotional brokenness is the birth mother of unblemished gentleness.

Cruelty is full of anxiety, but gentleness is overflowing with safety.

In gentle places even the weak gather strength.

Gentleness domesticates.

It is the strange disorder of man that he can brutally  murder another man and return home to hug and kiss his child goodnight.

A national border can turn gentleness into brutality.

To protect himself, a gentle man may turn viciously on his own friend.

The history of medicine is an weirdly alternating history of  harshness and gentleness with the human body.

Religion too often makes men harsh.

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shopping

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September 12, 2011

Overspending is thrill then nil.

New stuff winks, smiles and flashes some skin.

To walk away from the sale is to be able to actually think again.

Price comparisons put you in the driver’s seat; one option stuffs you in the trunk.

Shopping is a privilege; not shopping is a luxury or a nightmare.

Just one more thing is the grand redundancy of consumerism.

To buy, or not to buy, that is the tension.

Just a bit more expensive than we expected and a bit lower than we thought is the same thing.

Three quarters of the pleasure in shopping is in the hunting.

The best deals come by shopping for someone else.

Invest in truth to understand the past; sell stuff to simplify the present; buy for others to beautify the future.

Time eventually puts everything on sale.

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charity

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August 29, 2011

The principle of charity takes the massively unusual step of treating others as if they are sane.

In charity there is no excess except selfishness.

Selfishness procrastinates where charity begins.

To give is to get something no one can give.

To be uncharitable is to harm oneself.

A culture of generosity maybe created out of the experiences of leaders who have been deprived.

Don’t be silly; it is in giving that you lose — before you receive.

To have to receive what you wish you could give is harder than having to give what you wish you could keep.

Charity only works if there is responsibility on the other end.

The managers of charity look best without bulging pockets.

Fund raisers may expand the past, but donors want only present-tense truth.

Someone must be strong enough to ask for help for the weak.

Charity mustn’t begin in the home, it must begin in the bone, the deepest core of feeling and compassion.

The greatest acts of philanthropy the world has ever seen went unseen.

To help the very people who harmed you is the highest form of good.

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future

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August 22, 2011

Our scary dreams reveal our fears, our happy dreams reveal the future.

The beautiful future is sprouting in the disturbed ground under your feet — step forward.

Appreciate the past, love the present and trust the future.

Control the future; do something!

The future is known; it is an extension of the past.

We make the future from the thread of decisions unwound in the present.

Do you want to know your future; simply look closely at someone older than you.

Changing the future is all about convincing people to go there with you.

If your past is surrounded by love, your future will be encircled by love also.

Trust in God eliminates the fear of the future.

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ocean

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August 15, 2011

The seagull runs hopefully into the ocean, the child
runs happily to lunch and the soul runs hungrily to truth told in kind ways.

Our love of jumping up, sliding along and flowing forward fast invented the surf board, football and love.

An offshore breeze is like a cool-headed mind; both calm the agitated psyche and send  the rioting crowd home to rethink change.

The calm ocean looks  empty and benign – until we step on a sting ray,  have a limb ripped off by a shark or are swept away by a tsunami.  

The sunset in the tidal pool shines like gold, so wisdom glows softly in the human mind.

Waves that rush to the shore do not understand the hesitancy of the human spirit.

A child jumping at the ocean’s edge is like a naked man dancing by a smoking volcano is like a fool who will not change his ways.

Sand castles allow us to safely comprehend the fragility of human construction.

Sea weed piled on the hot sand is a rotting reminder that living things do best in homes.

As black sand patterns itself in light sand, so all of life swirls together, layers and stratifies.

Like a tiny pier at the edge of a great sea is a human life at the watery edge of time.

Warm sand between the toes, a cool breeze on the face, roaring waves in the ears, an icy drink in the mouth, a tasty sandwich in the hand and a friend to talk to – there is nothing much better than a work-free day at the beach.

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