A post as dead as a post

That last post was a puzzler, and I apologize. For some reason I felt compelled to blog on the distinction between substance and accident, even though it hasn't appeared in the news for quite some time. And I have a feeling that I will have more than one occasion to reference the "cat first" principle.

The figure was an obscure one: Antanaclasis, the repetition of a word in the same grammatical form but with a different meaning.

The title of this post is a good example. Jesus' saying, "Let the dead bury their dead", is a good example. Ben Franklin used Antanaclasis well when he said, "Your argument is sound...all sound." But my attempt at Antanaclasis in the last post may not have been all that good:

On this theory, my cat is not a cat, but the appearance of a cat; or to put it more precisely, “cat” is the name of an appearance.
...
On this theory, my cat is a cat, not a “cat.”

I'll have to make another go at it later, on the side. Meanwhile, the mnemonic image is simply a line of identical ants marching over a closet door: "Ant-on-a-closet." This does not quite distinguish Antanaclasis from Polyptoton, but as a figure of a figure it comes close enough.