| Canadian | ed | eration of Poets |
|
Dedicated to uniting people and organizations around the world in the global promotion of poets and poetry |
| members | | | CFPChat | | | contests & awards | | | links and education | | | CFPShop |
|
JOIN THE CFP
ABOUT CFP CONTACT CFP |
 |
|||||||
| SITE MAP |
| |||||||
|
Chiasmus: A grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two of parallel clauses is inverted in the other." Chiasmus is "a reversal in the order of words in two otherwise parallel phrases." Dr. Mardy Grothe collects exemplars of the art. We especially like this one, relayed by John F. Kennedy in 1956: According to the OED, chiasmus made its first published appearance in English in 1871 when a British scholar named A. S. Wilkins wrote about an observation from Cicero: "This is a good instance of the . . . figure called chiasmus . . . in which the order of words in the first clause is inverted in the second." The word goes back to the ancient Greeks and their fascination with language and rhetoric. The "chi" comes from chi, the letter "X" in the Greek alphabet. The word itself comes from the Greek word khiasmos, meaning "crossing." Khiasmos, in turn, is derived from the Greek word khiazein, meaning "to mark with an X." There are a few types, including; Go here to post your lesson results |
|||||||
