On Putrescence: a Very Strange Ode for Very Strange Times

Putrescence, a natural phenomenon, a cycle in the chain of life, it follows maturity that failed to produce and stayed around a bit more than perhaps it should. The word seems to have a visual onomatopoeic aspect, it looks like what it represents as well as sounding like what it is but perhaps that’s because the concept has melded to the word.

Or has it?

Putrescence in its metaphoric aspect represents not something in a normal state of evolution but something very wrong, something so negative only a metaphor will generate the required emotive response. Something unbearable. And that’s what its onomatopoeic component represents. A distortion of something fundamental to represent something disturbingly distorted.

This week, the third in July of 2014, for some reason brings the word to mind.
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