Red Terror
08-03-2016, 01:16 PM
For those of you who do not know (many of you do know, judging by the quality of your posts and threads) a chiasmic phrase is a rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, in the same or a modified form; e.g. “Lust is what makes you keep wanting to do it, Even when you have no desire to be with each other. Love is what makes you keep wanting to be with each other, Even when you have no desire to do it.” (Judith Viorst)
http://literarydevices.net/chiasmus/
In rhetoric, antimetabole is the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed order (e.g., "I know what I like, and I like what I know"). It is identical to the modern sense of chiasmus, although the classical chiasmus did not necessarily use repetition, but only in some cases. An easier way of understanding what an antimetabole means is comparing it to the commutative property of addition and multiplication. This means that for example, a + b = b + a. In terms of applying this property to language, an example would be, dance to live, not live to dance. Also an antimetabole does not just have to be simple words switched around, they can also be clauses placed in the middle of sentences that are reversed. For example, “Some people say I am bad at mathematics because it is not my favorite subject, but in reality, mathematics is not my favorite subject because I am bad at it.” An antimetabole is also said to be a little too predictive because it is easy to reverse the key term, but they pose questions that one usually would not think of if the phrase was just asked or said the initial way.
"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimetabole
http://literarydevices.net/chiasmus/
In rhetoric, antimetabole is the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed order (e.g., "I know what I like, and I like what I know"). It is identical to the modern sense of chiasmus, although the classical chiasmus did not necessarily use repetition, but only in some cases. An easier way of understanding what an antimetabole means is comparing it to the commutative property of addition and multiplication. This means that for example, a + b = b + a. In terms of applying this property to language, an example would be, dance to live, not live to dance. Also an antimetabole does not just have to be simple words switched around, they can also be clauses placed in the middle of sentences that are reversed. For example, “Some people say I am bad at mathematics because it is not my favorite subject, but in reality, mathematics is not my favorite subject because I am bad at it.” An antimetabole is also said to be a little too predictive because it is easy to reverse the key term, but they pose questions that one usually would not think of if the phrase was just asked or said the initial way.
"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimetabole