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Chiasmus is a figure of speech based on inverted parallelism. It's a rhetorical figure in which two clauses are related to each another through a reversal of terms in order to make a larger point.
- Perhaps the most famous example of chiasmus is a quote by John F. Kennedy from his inaugural address: "...ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."
- Jimmy Carter used it in his presidential farewell address: "America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way round. Human rights invented America." [1] (http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.org/documents/speeches/farewell.phtml)
- Dwight D. Eisenhower used chiasmus in a January 1958 speech to the Republican National Committee: "What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight — it's the size of the fight in the dog."
- A less presidential example comes from Mae West in I'm No Angel (1933): "Well, it's not the men in your life that counts, it's the life in your men."
- StarKist tuna advertisements from the 1980s included "Sorry, Charlie, StarKist wants tunas that taste good, not tunas with good taste."
- The physicist John Wheeler explained general relativity with "Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move."
- There are examples of chiasmus in the Bible. For example, Genesis 9:6: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed."
- An earlier example, from Croesus dates back to the 6th century BC: "In peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons."
- Several examples of chiasmus exist in the Book of Mormon. The entire chapter 36 of the book of Alma is written in a chiasmus format. Many believe that such overt use of chiasmus was beyond the abilities of Joseph Smith. This is considered by his followers to be evidence of the work's validity, though it can be argued that this rhetorical device was well known in his day if only for its presence in the Bible even if it had not yet been named as a specific rhetorical device.
Chiasmus may be implied, as when Kermit the Frog says "Time's fun when you're having flies" or Mae West says "A hard man is good to find."
Chiasmus is not limited to an exchange of words; it can also involve the exchange of letters or syllables, as in "Id Rather Have A Bottle In Front Of Me (Than A Frontal Lobotomy)," or the flipping of syntactical structures, as in "I love too much and too little hate."
This criss-crossing term derives its name from the X-shaped Greek letter χ (chi). An informal term for chiasmus introduced by Calvin Trillin and used particularly among political speechwriters is reversible raincoat sentences.
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