Antimetabole Can Be Pithy and Powerful, or Trite and Oversimplified And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change. In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. In this quote, Sarah Palin's use of antimetabole occurs at the ends of two separate sentences as opposed to back to back. But since the heart of antimetabole is the inverted repetition of two phrases or clauses, the repetition can also be spaced farther apart, embedded in longer sentences or even separate sentences. Typically, antimetabole occurs in adjacent phrases or clauses. Phrases of Antimetabole are Usually-But Not Always-Back to Back The French work to live, whereas Americans live to work. In the expression below, the antimetabole is a perfectly reversed repetition, but the subjects of the two phrases are different (one is about the French, the other about Americans), making the two clauses of the sentence slightly asymmetrical: For instance, in this line from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, an adjective ("witty") turns into a noun ("wit") when repeated, and a noun ("fool") turns into an adjective ("foolish") so that the sentence will make grammatical sense: In fact, in many cases the repeated phrases wouldn't make grammatical sense if they were simply an exact reversal of the original word order. While symmetry is central to antimetabole because of the way it repeats the same phrase in reverse order, exact symmetry is not required for something to count as antimetabole. The Repeated Phrases of Antimetabole Don't Have to Contain Exactly the Same Words There are a few additional nuances of antimetabole that are helpful to know in order to understand it. Here's how to pronounce antimetabole: an-tee-met- ab-oh-lee A Closer Look at Antimetabole Antimetabole comes from a Greek phrase that means, "turning about in the opposite direction," and which sums up the effect of words being repeated in reverse order, sort of like retracing steps on a path. ![]() Antimetabole is tricky to use: it can be moving, memorable, and persuasive, but it can also feel trite and predictable if used poorly.It can be used to convey paradoxes and irony, to strengthen an argument, or to show in a novel way how two ideas relate to each other. Antimetabole appears in a wide variety of contexts, from jokes and idioms to political speeches and literature. ![]() Some additional key details about antimetabole: Kennedy's words, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," is a famous example of antimetabole. What is antimetabole? Here’s a quick and simple definition:Īntimetabole is a figure of speech in which a phrase is repeated, but with the order of words reversed.
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