chiasmus

See also: Chiasmus

English

WOTD – 18 January 2012

Etymology

From Latin chiasmus, from Ancient Greek χιασμός (khiasmós), from χιάζω (khiázō, “to mark with a chi”), from χ (kh, “chi”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /kaɪˈæzməs/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

Noun

chiasmus (countable and uncountable, plural chiasmi or chiasmuses)

Examples
To stop too fearful, and too faint to go Oliver Goldsmith, "The Traveller" haec queritur, stupet haec (this woman complains, this one gapes) Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 1.124. Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" Thou shouldst eat to live, not live to eat. Attributed to Socrates; repeated by Cicero

1. (rhetoric) An inversion of the relationship between the elements of phrases.
   • 1934, H. H. Walker, N. W. Lund, “The Literary Structure of the Book of Habakkuk”, in Journal of Biblical Literature, 53 (4): 355:

     The book of Habakkuk has been discovered to consist of a closely knit chiastic structure throughout. This is the first poem of such length to stand revealed as a literary unit of this kind, though chiasmus has already been discovered throughout many psalms […]

   • 1984, Ethel Grodzins Romm, “Persuasive Writing”, in American Bar Association Journal, 70: 158:

     John F. Kennedy is more famous for his chiasmus than for many of his policies:
     "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country."

   • 2002, Simon R. Slings, “Figures of Speech in Aristophanes”, in Andreas Willi, editor, The Language of Greek Comedy, pages 103–104:

     Leeman therefore holds that chiasmus is the basic order in Greek and Latin: antithesis is, he claims, normal for the modern, rational mind, but for the Greeks and Romans chiasmus was more natural.

   • 2009, Seyed Ghahreman Safavi, Simon Weightman, Rūmī's Mystical Design: Reading the Mathnawī, Book One, page 46:

     The realization that Mawlānā was using parallelism and chiasmus to organize the higher levels of his work has been a major surprise.

Synonyms

• chiasm

Derived terms

• chiastic

Related terms

• chiasma

Translations

(rhetoric) an inversion of the relationship between the elements of phrases

• Catalan: quiasme m
• Finnish: kiasma
• French: chiasme (fr) m
• German: Chiasmus (de) m
• Irish: croseagar m
• Italian: chiasmo (it) m
• Norwegian:

  Bokmål: kiasme m

  Nynorsk: kiasme m

• Polish: chiazm m
• Portuguese: quiasmo (pt) m, quiasma f
• Russian: хиазм (ru) m (xiazm), инверсия во второ́й половине фразы (inversija vo vtorój polovine frazy)
• Spanish: quiasmo (es) m
• Swedish: kiasm (sv) c

Further reading

• chiasmus on Wikipedia.Wikipedia