Case Study #18: The Case of the American Banner Flapping Inside Us All

1

We begin in medias res, approaching our location from above, an air raid siren slowly warbling up in volume to warn us of something or to warn others of us – such is the ambiguity of attribution and addressee that will prove to be the throughline of this song, like clouds swirling into a double-helix whose DNA sequence the listener’s ears will stretch taut to futilely try to decode over the course of the next three minutes and two seconds. But that could just as well be a fog horn dopplering in at the start of “Comeback Kid.” Or a coastal tidal wave warning, telling us we have seconds to scramble up to higher ground. No matter: the sixteen seconds of the intro are up and we’re in the thick of it now, with a sturdy drumbeat descending like the metal bar that gets locked across your chest before a rollercoaster starts.

Immediately, though, we’re disoriented by something new, a question as intriguing as any that Sherlock Holmes posed to Dr. Watson on a windy moor or in a previously locked room: what is this drumbeat? It starts with a solidly-spaced Thump Thump, but then drummer McKenzie Smith (of the band Midlake, but also a studio player for the likes of St. Vincent, Regina Spektor, and Thao & the Get Down Stay Down)[1] imbues his rhythm with more witchiness than a season of Agatha All Along. It starts with a build-up fill in between the next dominant beats, like a basketball player doing several powerful bounces of the ball on a layup to the hoop. We get a repeat of that pattern as either the organ (played by singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten) or the synthesizer (played by John Congleton) or the guitar (played by Lars Horntveth) lets out a cat’s yowl. Then, as he begins it a third time, Smith reverses mid-layup to just hit one of the toms eight times in quick succession, ending with a cymbal crash and then the haunting organ notes start to lilt and wilt in the foreground, with that mad percussion math carrying on in the background for the rest of the song like something important is being figured out at the chalkboard on our behalf.

Or maybe it’s not a tom that he’s hitting there, and maybe those aren’t eight beats slapping the floor like Rocky double-dutching his jump rope as he trains for a match – I am not a musician and that fact could be a problem in this song’s exegesis, except that I think it’s the opposite: the perfect fit for a piece of music that has, at its heart, a multivalence message that only a confused outsider can properly circumscribe.

“Comeback Kid,” the first single from Sharon Van Etten’s fifth album, 2019’s Remind Me Tomorrow, is an anthem of 21st century ambivalence and ambiguity about the American dream that any of us here can write about with authority, because we are all factors in that equation that doesn’t add up.

2

In fact, tellingly, the voice that begins to address us at the :35 second mark is suffused with not so much a world-weary drawl as much as a paradoxical mix of hesitation and urgency: see, there’s that ambivalence already, like a slow pony express galloping the message towards us through the dust of our nation’s history. She’s throwing down a gauntlet here, Sharon Van Etten, and companionably asking us to keep up – but toward what end isn’t clear, and that’s the point. And it doesn’t stop there. By the time we get to the end of the first verse, we realize we’re going to need to get acclimated to an atmosphere of dizzying perspective reversals here:

“Hey, you’re the comback kid”
See me look away, I’m the runaway
I’m the stay-out-late, I’m recovering
Kid at the top of our street
I was somewhat like him, I was somebody

Second person, first person, first person, third person and fourth combined, first and third squished together – and so it goes for the rest of the song, in a cloudy do-si-do that’s both humid with the sweat of interlinked referents and close and low oxygen-inducing, like a party in Sartre’s No Exit room. But that description misses an important, leavening element at work here: the celebratory tone that drives us home throughout “Comeback Kid.”

The title should be enough of a clue, but there’s the theme of the song too: a celebration of all the work “that drives us home” in America, all the effort it takes just to stay in place – even when our sense of place seems to be somewhere else. This broad civic project we’re all a part of unites even the rich and the poor on the same factory floor of self-identity struggles. Thus, at the :55 second mark – at the end of the third line – we hear an electronic Weet WOO, like a factory whistle signaling the end of the work day. The whole town’s filing out – an everyday occurrence becomes a parade – and suddenly the chorus kicks in with a martial tempo that will make you want to stand up and stomp your feet, in line with friends and strangers alike.

McKenzie Smith hits the crash cymbal with every syllable of the title words, repeated three times, and then he backs off as Van Etten’s voice rises up to croon: “Let me look at you…” That’s it, no rhyming or harmonizing or anything else – all business and then back to work. And work, in this case, includes drawing our attention to not just traditional song elements like that that are missing, but also to lacunae in the lyrics themselves. You can see that in lines three and four of the first verse: “stay-out-late” is a compound adjective that should be followed by a noun; “recovering” is usually a transitive verb, but here that expectation is truncated; and “Kid at the top of our street” could be a continuation from line three’s “I’m,” however the ellipses is so long that it’s sung just as a standalone noun phrase, with a defiance in Van Etten’s voice that elevates the status of the fragments spread throughout this singular song. Again, we find this phenomenon in the second verse with lines like: “Yeah, I’m the runaway, I’m the hardly stay/let slip away.” And, to make sure we get the point, it turns up at the very end of the song in a novel way: the first chorus is sung in full again, with Smith amping things up with some new slide-n-hit business back on his kit through the fourth line “Let me look at you,” but then when they all begin again, the rug gets pulled out from under us:

Comeback kid
Comeback kid
Come back

Where the final word should be (not to mention the chorus’s fourth line), we instead get a fast fadeout, like Van Etten and company have folded up their three-card monte table and left town in a cartoon puff of dust.

But that musical sleight of hand is exactly the point – it underscores the theme of this song, which may as well have been titled “Missing.” But there already was a song called “Missing” by someone else, recorded way back in 1994 and not put on any album. It only turned up over the opening and end credits of the 1995 Sean Penn-directed film The Crossing Guard, which was so indie (and bombed so badly at the box office) that it didn’t even have a soundtrack released.[2] No matter: that song (a stone cold masterpiece, in my opinion, along with that film) serves as an expedient window into a particular house of well-known Americana art that Sharon Van Etten is now a part of.

“Comeback Kid” – with all its embossed rhythms and stacked perspectives – is a modern-day Rosetta Stone in dialogue with the complete Bruce Springsteen oeuvre – as well as the lineage he himself has carried forward from the last century to this 21st century recidivist future we befuddled Americans find ourselves in.

3

By “befuddled Americans,” I mean all of us, those of us on both sides of the aisle and the millions who straddle the line in between. I am completing this essay several weeks after the shocking 2024 presidential election and yet nothing has changed in the pages I’ve been typing here – nor really, as far as its theme is concerned, out there in the long-term landscape of America’s relationship to its own identity. That throughline is the incongruity between our feeling at home in this country and all it stands for and our feeling that there are major things wrong where we are and we would be better off getting up and leaving for parts unknown – either literally, metaphorically, or both – and that is the mixed message we have heard Bruce Springsteen sing, again and again and again.

You could throw a rock into a crowd of Springsteen lyric sheets and land on an example of this nearly every time. Of course, though, our first thoughts go to his most famous song, 1984’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” and there we find this situation in spades, even right from the first line: “Born down in a dead man’s town.” BOOM: alienation from the place that should feel like home is coupled with a reference to a past that asks for more respect than we’ll ever get and that we know will never be commensurate to the wrongs that happened back then anyway. Then it’s off to the races with a narrator who can’t find a sense of belonging coming and going: he gets in trouble in his hometown, so he joins the army and gets sent to the Vietnam War; when he returns, he can’t get hired at the town refinery, nor does he find any help at the V.A. office; and we leave him, 10 years after his deployment, reflecting on the brothers-in-arms bond he had in that faraway land, while now he’s existing barely outside of prison and likely homeless, ironically tenuously settled in the part of town where he had hoped to be employed. Hitting with a cadence not unlike the chorus of “Comeback Kid,” the chorus of “Born in the U.S.A.” is infamous for its oft-misinterpreted tone.

It's not patriotism, nor pride of any kind – it’s defiant ambivalence about this place we’ve found ourselves in, from birth or otherwise.

It’s there in the opening lines of the title track to his breakthrough 1975 third album Born to Run: “In the day we sweat it out on the streets of/a runaway American dream” – a setting sketch that anticipates the end of “Born in the U.S.A.” It’s there in the gist of the title track of his next album, 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town: again, like at the end of “Born in the U.S.A.,” the protagonist of this song exists on the periphery of the place he’s long called home and, in fact, he might be homeless now too. (“Well now I lost my money and I lost my wife” are circumstances that seem to have led to this location where he resides: “You can tell her that I’m easily found/Tell her there’s a spot out ‘neath Abram’s Bridge”). He repeats this theme of moving out from the center of things with the title song of his next album, 1980’s The River: that titular spot that had once been a source of hope and solace for the protagonist and his wife later dries up and symbolizes the profound lines “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true/Or is it something worse.” Then, there are the many song protagonists of his who set their sights farther afield to – futilely – try to remedy the ennui or trouble they’ve found themselves in their hometowns: from the guy in “Hungry Heart” who confides in us “Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack/I went out for a ride and I never went back,” though by the middle of the song concedes “Everybody needs a place to rest/Everybody want to have a home”; to the man in ”Atlantic City” who tells us “Well I got a job and I put my money away/But I got the kind of debts that no honest man can pay,” so now he is exhorting his lady to meet him down at the boardwalk oasis in question, where he hopes participating in a criminal enterprise might turn their luck around; to the traveler in “Further On (Up the Road),” who tells us “I got this fever burning in my soul” and so “I’ll meet you further on up the road.”

Springsteen, of course, is just carrying on a long tradition in the American songbook with this trope. We know it well from the oeuvre of his biggest lyrical influence: Bob Dylan. Many of Dylan’s protagonists are introduced to us already on the road (which is no surprise given that Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, was an early influence of his)[3]: from the solemn recitation of places seen in “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”; to the picaresque romantic rollercoaster chronicled in “Tangled Up in Blue”; to the weary, apocalyptic trudging “In the last outback at the world’s end” documented in “Ain’t Talkin’.” And we see it, in turn, in the most famous song by the man who influenced Dylan: Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” The protagonist of that unofficial national anthem of ours describes walking, roaming, rambling, and strolling everywhere except a singular place he might call home. Likewise with the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man,” and the country music songs that influenced it. And the tales of hitting the road – dusty and both hopeful and forlorn – in blues music that are the foundation of all of the above.

The allure of setting out and starting anew elsewhere with more success and satisfaction isn’t just an element of the – myth of – the American Dream. (Though that specious concept can be found throughout our culture – for example in the title character of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, one of the most long-lasting classics of American literature still taught in school). No, on the contrary: relocation – both voluntary and forced – is factually a part of America’s DNA. It seems a cliché to trot out the historic highlights (or rather lowlights) on this topic, but it serves as a germane segue into this section’s final point: from the Pilgrams relocating to the east coast of North America from Great Britian; to their and their descendants’ relocation – and murder – of the Native Americans who were already here; to their descendants’ relocation of residents of Africa to these shores to work as slaves; to the waves of asylum-seeking migrants who have relocated to America from hundreds of countries around the world for almost 250 years; to the waves of internal relocations that have happened, most notably the Great Migration of African Americans out of the south to escape Jim Crow oppression; to the relocations of whole neighborhoods when interstate highways and other big infrastructure projects were built; to the relocation-by-default of African Americans that resulted from state and federal housing and mortgage redlining policies; to the relocation of some Chinese American communities out of the very cities they had helped to build; to the relocation of Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II; to the Manifest Destiny justification that led European American settlers to relocate from the east to the west of the continent; to all the political, economic, family-related, work-related, and now even climate change-related reasons people move between states these days – it all adds up to an overarching commonality that may not have a throughline of causes, but, nonetheless, unites us in the experience of having a shaky relationship to the concept of “home” in America.

In fact, I’d make the case that this is what we should think of when we see the unofficial motto of the United States of America: E pluribus unum. (In 1956, Congress passed an act making “In God We Trust” our official motto, despite its blatant contradiction of the First Amendment)[4]. That Latin phrase, meaning “Out of many, one” or “One from many,” was originally a nod to the solidarity among the first Thirteen Colonies in their resistance to rule from afar by the British monarchy.[5] Later, it dovetailed nicely with the melting pot concept that held sway over how America saw itself, until multiculturalism rose up in the zeitgeist and challenged the idea of a heterogeneous society becoming more homogeneous. But I think that phrase equally speaks to our shared alienation from this place itself – and from all it promises but doesn’t provide – and that is reflected in something else “Comeback Kid” shares with its antecedents listed above: the casual overlap and acknowledgement of other perspectives within a song.

I don’t mean other perspectives on a matter, but rather clues that the inclusion of others is important in the act of telling these musical tales themselves. This suffuses Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics so much that it can be like a fish trying to see water – but once you start, soon instances of this will hit your ears like waves – and, in fact, it was already there in the songs we looked at above. “You can tell her that I'm easily found,” he sings on “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” locking together the protagonist’s first-person perspective with both a second-person addressee and a distant, but significant, third-person character’s considerations of all we’re about to hear. “Hungry Heart” of course starts – after Max Weinberg’s famous collapsing scaffolding drum fill – with Springsteen’s protagonist seeming to lean in to tell his story to a stranger at a bar: “Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack.” That trope of addressing someone – besides us, the listeners – ricochets from song to song: his paramour “baby” in “Atlantic City”; the probable salesman “sir” in “Used Cars”; both his paramour “my dear” and his “kids” in “Long Time Coming”; his paramour “darlin’” in “Land of Hope and Dreams”; the wishful addressees “baby” and even “man” of the lonely protagonist in “Dancing in the Dark,” who also briefly veers into an idiomatic third-person reference with “Stay on the streets of this town/And they'll be carvin' you up alright”; and on and on. Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon turns up in many Bob Dylan songs too: from the call and response between the traveler and the one who’s stayed back home – perhaps a parent – in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”; to the fluid switches from third-person references in “Tangled Up In Blue,” as in she/her, to second-person, as in “Pourin’ off of every page/Like it was written in my soul from me to you,” on back to third-person, but now plural with no established antecedent, as in “I lived with them on Montague Street/In a basement down the stairs”; to the switching back and forth in “Ain’t Talkin’” that’s so masterful it’s like the sides of a blade being sharpened on a whetstone, from “So pray for me, mother” to “I’ll burn that bridge before you can cross” to “The whole wide world which people say is round/They will tear your mind away from contemplation” to “Someday you’ll be glad to have me around”; to all his songs in between and after that slot together such disparate glances at people to his right and left, front and back, everywhere in the aggregate that it’s a cast the size of our country we’re talking about. No wonder, then, that Dylan’s own predecessor Woody Guthrie’s most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land,” doesn’t just stretch its arms across our whole country, it also teaches school children how the perspectives (and rights) of “your” and “my” are inextricably linked. Not only that, but he even sneaks in an abstract, third-person perspective for equal measure: “All around me, a voice was sounding/This land was made for you and me.” E pluribus unum indeed!

Except that, in the context of this essay, I think that phrase needs to be taken even further – in the opposite direction. “Comeback Kid” and all its predecessors are really about the struggle to make “out of many, one” in ourselves. Reconciling with our sense of home here – that starts with the complexity of our sense of place in America, but it ends with us looking inward at all the more opaque and convoluted complexities we contain.

4

This fall, I had two dreams in the space of a couple weeks that are pertinent to what I’m talking about. They were unusual because both took place in my childhood home – the large, dark, sprawling, 1920s Craftsman my dad and stepmom still live in in Oakland – which is not a setting I had dreamed about to my knowledge in many years, if not decades even. But serendipitously they came to me not only just as our nation’s latest identity crisis was coming to a head, but also when my musings on this one Sharon Van Etten song were coalescing into a couple key components in search of a final central one.

The first dream began very stereotypically: I woke up (in the dream) and realized I had just a few minutes before I needed to be downtown at the office and presentable for the weekly team check-in at 8:00 AM. (I had this dream as I slept in on a Sunday morning; Mondays are the one day a week I work away from home). As I vacillated between sending all my coworkers a message at once or just messaging my boss, the curtains parted, so to speak, and I found myself in my childhood home – but still as an adult who was late for work. I registered the presence of neither my dad nor stepmom there. However, I did sense that my 15 year-old who lives with me half-time was nestled somewhere in a back room. Then, either through knocking or visuals out the living room windows, I became aware there was a group of people who wanted to enter the house. They were strangers and I had no interest in letting them in. Yet suddenly they were inside, and I was frantically moving about the living room trying to corral them together and send them back out, while simultaneously worrying about my kid’s safety and what to do about my tardiness with work. That’s it – and while its plot was sparse, what happened in the next dream was even more pared down.

In that one, I was back there in my childhood home, again with no sense of my dad or stepmom’s presence, nor my kid’s this time. However, there was some unidentifiable other person inside – who lived there too – who warned me about something ominous and imminent. Perhaps they said something like “They’re coming!” or “It’s about to happen!” In any case, this time, rather than repel intruders out of my home (which is no longer my home), I went into the walk-in pantry in the kitchen and hid. As I woke up, I was trying to squeeze my adult body up onto a shelf and behind cereal and cracker boxes, there in that place of cozy safety where I had snuck chocolate chips out of their bag as a kid.

And that’s it also – but everything we need to know is there, because I am one of those people who subscribes to the notion that every element in a dream is a facet of ourselves: the protagonist; the unmet work obligation; the endangered kid in the distance; the murky stranger with the warning; the strangers trying to and succeeding in gaining entry; the even more nebulous ominous threat in the offing; the well-stocked refuge in the kitchen with its badly-latched door; and especially the whole setting of these dreams overall. That’s me too: my home (which is no longer my home).

That’s what “Comeback Kid” and all those other songs are really about: the home (which is no longer our home) within ourselves.

Thus, within that slice of Bruce Springsteen songs that have their protagonists leaving town or thinking of doing so, there is the not infrequent even more niche genre of songs where the protagonist alludes to traveling within himself in a forlorn way. Born in the U.S.A. literally has a song on it called “I’m Goin’ Down,” which, while ostensibly about a man communicating his feelings about sexual rejection from his romantic partner, nonetheless aligns the concept of self-reflection with the metaphorical framework of traveling – and traveling in a particular direction, at that. In the chorus of “Youngstown” on The Ghost of Tom Joad, he laments, “My sweet Jenny, I’m sinking down/Here darlin’ in Youngstown,” between verses that tread the familiar ground of economic deprivation despite generations of hard work in a place thatr could be Anytown, U.S.A. On “Downbound Train,” also on Born in the U.S.A., the protagonist cries out, “Don’t you feel like you’re a rider/On a downbound train?” in between chronicling all his loses for us: his girl, his job, and then other jobs too. There, he switched from first-person to second-person and that’s the case also with “You’ll Be Coming Down” on Magic, with, again, a combination of both specious romantic and economic potential, as in: “Easy street, a quick buck and true lies/Smiles as thin as those dusky blue skies.” That crucible down inside us where we must face the mettle we’re made of is both “The Promised Land” he sings of on the song with that name on Darkness on the Edge of Town and also the deep unhealed wound we all carry, memorably described in this enigmatic verse in Born in the U.S.A.’s “I’m on Fire”:

Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife
baby
edgy and dull and cut a six-inch valley
through the middle of my soul

Nowhere in Springsteen’s oeuvre, though, are our conflicted feelings about introspection captured more profoundly than these pithy lines from Born to Run’s “Thunder Road”: “Don’t turn me home again/I just can’t face myself alone again.” From that, we can telescope back to find new meaning in all the Bob Dylan lyrics about protagonists wandering far from home; and also new meaning even in Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” with its uplifting vibe paradoxically overlaid on a lyrical atlas of our country that doesn’t include anything about putting down roots anywhere. Through pillars of American culture such as these songs, we continually legitimize looking elsewhere in lieu of tending to the home within ourselves.

That’s what my dreams this fall were about: both trying to repel and trying to hide from the parts of myself that would like to disrupt the status quo I have diligently maintained since I literally lived in my childhood home and then internalized it as a frozen symbol of my survival mode sense of self. We have to welcome and integrate together all parts of ourselves that want to assemble to play out a contradictory narrative upon the proving ground of our personal “home,” day after cumulative day of our arduous lives on earth, until we are carrying around a palimpsest of this burden. (I am aware this sounds like the psychotherapy approach called Internal Family Systems[6], which has helped many people, however I myself find its rigid and idiosyncratic terminology and processes to be off-putting; we can find our own paths to this self-work and each is valid, even via writing an essay like this). We have to not just normalize this work, but also celebrate it in a way that spreads the practice to others – until it’s not just individuals doing this healing, but also the towns themselves all across America that, at this point in the 21st century, seem to epitomize the fractured persona I’m talking about here – and what better way to do that than through the very American festive banner that is the rock song.

Thus, we conclude by returning to the first single off Sharon Van Etten’s 2019 album Remind Me Tomorrow to experience the catharsis “Comeback Kid” provides with fresh eyes.

5

“Comeback Kid” has a second songwriter, besides Van Etten, someone who does not appear in this capacity or any others on the rest of Remind Me Tomorrow: Sam Cohen. Cohen was a founding member of the early-2000s psychedelic rock-pop band Apollo Sunshine, then turned to recording solo projects, under his own name and under the stage name Yellowbirds. (Additionally, he has contributed to recordings as producer, songwriter, or musician for artists as varied as Norah Jones, Shakira, Dawn Landes, The Banana Splits, Joseph Arthur, and Trixie Whitley).[7] What is pertinent here, though, is the fact that Cohen is also a visual artist, known for his collages on both his album covers and in the animation for his music videos. Furthermore, for his animation for the Yellowbirds songs “The Reason”[8] and “Young Men of Promise,”[9] he cut up and reconfigured scans of other people’s art. (Michael Arthur’s for the former and Kara Smith for the latter). It should be no surprise, then, that lyrically “Comeback Kid” comes across as not just a collage (with the adumbrated phrases I detailed at the top bringing to mind the grammatical phenomenon known as anacoluthon, which Merriam-Webster online defines as: “syntactical inconsistency or incoherence within a sentence; especially : a shift in an unfinished sentence from one syntactic construction to another”)[10] but also one that incorporates together different perspectives to the point that they form a wholly new shape, while also creating a cadence (not unlike McKenzie Smith’s drumming) where each facet bumps up against the next.

That multi-faceted lens is actually a single person’s refraction of their many perspectives on the “home” that is their self. Watch that play out now in the third and final verse of “Comeback Kid”:

"Kid came back a real turn around"
Please believe that I want to stay
"Got a job now that my brother found
Working nights just a mile away"
Don't let me slip away, I'm not a runaway
It just feels that way

For this section of the song, Van Etten’s voice rises to a higher, more optimistic register. Smith switches from the earlier funkiness to a quick, even tempo throughout this verse, barring hard cymbal crashes leading into “Don’t” and “I’m” and “It,” as if to suture wounds quickly within the flapping tent walls of a hectic battlefield’s field hospital.

“Get back out there, soldier!” this song is saying, “Brave the slings and arrows the enemy hurls your way.” The enemy is us, the obstacles we throw up in our own path to keep the “home” within ourselves from seeming like an achievable option. But we have been there this whole time, both locked inside and locked out, naively perplexed by that paradox with the same wide eyes we’ve always had. Yet cutting through all this mystery is easier than we think. In many ways, “Comeback Kid” is a very literal song.

Come. Back. KID.

The kid in question is our childhood self. “Let me look at you,” we sing along as the final verse kicks in. But like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown at the last second, that word gets yanked out of the final line, and we’re left to contemplate disconnection from our self once again.

[1] https://www.allmusic.com/artist/mckenzie-smith-mn0000563674

[2] https://estreetshuffle.com/index.php/2021/01/10/roll-of-the-dice-missing/

[3] https://lithub.com/on-bob-dylans-literary-influences/

[4] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/84/hjres396/text

[5] https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/27807.pdf

[6] https://ifs-institute.com/

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Cohen_(musician)

[8] https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2011/05/09/136064176/first-watch-10-years-of-drawings-used-for-yellowbirds-video

[9] https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2013/04/25/178597031/video-music-meets-random-imagery-in-yellowbirds-young-men-of-promise

[10] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anacoluthon