It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog is an example of the rhetorical device called antimetabole, from Greek words that mean “a turning about.” Other examples include When the going gets tough, the tough get going and Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Antimetabole involves inverting the words in a statement, and it’s a subset of chiasmus, which can also involve inverting the syntax or structure or ideas, as in the line from Martin Luther King Jr’s. famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,”Injustice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere. The word chiasmus derives from the X-shaped Greek letter chi. For a popular book about chiasmus, check out Never Let a Kiss Fool You or a Fool Kiss You (Amazon) by Mardy Grothe. This is part of a complete episode.
After our conversation about funny street names, listeners chime in with more: In Tallahassee, Florida, there’s a Frankie Lane and a Lois Lane; in Batesville, Arkansas, you can meet up at the intersection of Gwinn and Barrett; Boulder Creek...
Martin, who lives in San Diego, California, shares some of his favorite surfing slang, including A-frame, boosting, and gnar. He’s curious about the use of gangbusters in filmmaker Bruce Brown’s surfing classic The Endless Summer 2 to...
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