NEVER LET A KISS FOOL YOU, OR A FOOL KISS YOU

January 21, 2003 4:59 AM

What did John F. Kennedy, Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Samuel Johnson, and Confucius all have in common? They were masters of chiasmus. If you've ever been amused by the simple but elegant word play in sentences like "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy, or "It's not the men in my life, it's the life in my men", then you appreciate a good chiasmus when you hear one. via the always interesting bragadocchio
posted by iconomy (48 comments total)

MAD Magazine are also masters at this. They used to call them Switch-a-roos and had whole articles on them. For example:
-A smoker craves a cig in the pack, Kermit the Frog craves a....
-A gambler backs up a hunch, Jason (from Friday the 13th)...

Those are the only two I can remember at the moment but there were lots of others.
posted by PenDevil at 5:04 AM on January 21, 2003

Damn it! I thought that bottle quote was a Tom Waits original. Apparently it's from a song title. Anyone know if the real pain / sham pain quote is his? I'm horrified.
posted by sudasana at 5:34 AM on January 21, 2003

What's the difference between a viola player and a seamstress? A seamstress tucks up frills.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 5:36 AM on January 21, 2003

Is everyone, including the original link above, confusing some instances of chiasmus with instances of spoonerism? I see no part of any dictionary definition of chiasmus that allows for the switching of parts of words, but only the position of the words themselves.
posted by nthdegx at 5:58 AM on January 21, 2003

d'oh
posted by PenDevil at 6:02 AM on January 21, 2003

And he can cut guns in half with his mind!
posted by jozxyqk at 6:14 AM on January 21, 2003

The Sphinx from The Mystery Men movie spoke in chiasmus almost constantly:

"To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn. "

"He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions. "

And, best of all:

"When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you can head off your foes with a balanced attack."
posted by Scoo at 6:19 AM on January 21, 2003

From MerriamWebster.com: Chiasmus: an inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases (as in Goldsmith's to stop too fearful, and too faint to go)

nthdegx, I'm thrilled that you researched the definition. And the frontal lobotomy one is definitely a derivative, but clearly within the "guidelines" ;)
posted by iconomy at 6:24 AM on January 21, 2003

Don't forget Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain!

It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

Really cool link, I love learning about stuff like this!
posted by vito90 at 6:26 AM on January 21, 2003

See also: each tired political speech in the past 30-odd years. (I call it the JFK Effect...it worked well and was somewhat surprising once upon a time.)

(also see my high school guidance counselor, who kept telling me "If you fail to plan, you're planning to fail." Fine, but if he'd been living up to HIS full potential, would he be stuck in high school all day?)
posted by Vidiot at 6:28 AM on January 21, 2003

What's the difference between a viola player and a seamstress? A seamstress tucks up frills.

Along the same lines, you know the difference between an angry rooster and a hooker, don't you?

A rooster clucks defiance...
posted by Vidiot at 6:32 AM on January 21, 2003

sudasna - according to everything2.com the sham pain one is an Edwardian toast: "I wish champagne to my real friends, and real pain to my sham friends" --Edwardian Toast
posted by vito90 at 6:37 AM on January 21, 2003

Proof that MetaFilter is filled with what matters.
posted by rory at 6:37 AM on January 21, 2003

I was always fond of the saying: "Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things."
posted by beth at 6:43 AM on January 21, 2003

...milled with what fatters? I don't get it.

(Now I'm going to be hearing nonexistent chiasmuses all day... thanks a lot, iconomy)
chiasmi? chiasmae?
posted by ook at 6:52 AM on January 21, 2003

Found a good one from Jimi - "When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace. "
--Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) American Musician, Guitarist, Singer, Songwriter
posted by vito90 at 6:58 AM on January 21, 2003

There's a lot of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon too.

Mosiah 3:18-19:
(Men will drink damnation to their souls unless)

(a) They HUMBLE themselves

(b) and become as little CHILDREN

(c) believing that salvation is in the ATONING BLOOD OF CHRIST;

(d) for the NATURAL MAN

(e) is an enemy of GOD

(f) and HAS BEEN from the fall of Adam

(f') and WILL BE forever and ever

(e') unless he yieldeth to the HOLY SPIRIT

(d') and putteth off the NATURAL MAN

(c') and becometh a saint through the ATONEMENT OF CHRIST

(b') and becometh as a CHILD

(a') submissive, meek and HUMBLE.

posted by oissubke at 6:59 AM on January 21, 2003

The difference between a woman in church and a woman in the tub?

The woman in church has hope in her soul...
posted by norm at 7:07 AM on January 21, 2003

the role of journalists: to comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable
posted by luser at 7:17 AM on January 21, 2003

Dorothy Parker.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 7:26 AM on January 21, 2003

This link is spectacular. Except now I have absolutely no desire to see that awful-looking 25th Hour movie, which was intriguing only because of the 'real friends/sham friends' line in the trailer (which I had assumed was a creation of the screenwriter). Sudasana, the line is referred to in the link as an Edwardian toast. There is nothing new under the sun.
posted by grrarrgh00 at 7:44 AM on January 21, 2003

Actually 25th hour wasn't bad. Much better than the trailers make it out to be.

/ derail
posted by KnitWit at 9:07 AM on January 21, 2003

...milled with what fatters? I don't get it.

Read on, ook:

Chiasmus doesn't just involve the reversal of single words, as you've seen in the quotations so far. Chiasmus can also be achieved by reversing complete phrases, individual letters of words, sounds of words, and occasionally even numbers.
posted by rory at 9:09 AM on January 21, 2003

Rats. Hate having to explain a joke.
posted by rory at 9:17 AM on January 21, 2003

*realization dawns*
*thwacks forehead*
*feels stupid*
posted by ook at 9:31 AM on January 21, 2003

The quote about the bottle is from The Existential Blues, by Tom T-Bone Stankus. Here are the chords, if you have the nerve to sing it in public.
posted by sheauga at 9:48 AM on January 21, 2003

A good man is hard to find; a hard man is good to find-Mae West
posted by quercus at 9:51 AM on January 21, 2003

In types of chiasmus the chiasmus.com author refers to many examples of spoonerism as "implied chiasmus", which I would interpret as "not chiasmus". His argument for including spoonerisms as a form of "I suddenly realised" chiasmus is somewhat dubious.

Great link to a great site - but I still say a lot of you are spoonerising. No definition of chiasmus I can find allows for spoonerism.
posted by nthdegx at 9:55 AM on January 21, 2003

That toast reminds me of one of my favorite jokes, which nearly always falls completely flat:
Why do people pay so much for shampoo when the real stuff is free?
posted by MrMoonPie at 10:14 AM on January 21, 2003

I learned the word chiasmus from the introduction to my highschool copy of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The whole novel's written as a chiasmus, with the reflection occuring as the preacher looks down at his watch, in the middle of the middle chapter--the one that's a long sermon.
posted by jbrjake at 10:18 AM on January 21, 2003

MetaFilter: As good as the day is long, as long as the day is good.
posted by LinusMines at 11:15 AM on January 21, 2003

sudasana - Don't Give Up Hope!!!

Okay, give up hope on the real pain / champagne one. But as for the bottle in front of me / frontal lobotomy, both song sources cited for this, by Randy Hanzlick and Tom T-Bone Stankus, respectively, were supposedly first recorded in 1980.

Yep, that's a while ago. But I distinctly remember first hearing the phrase uttered by Tom Waits when he appeared on the late, great Fernwood 2-night (which later morphed into America 2-night) - this 8/1/77 episode, I think, which gives him a 3-year head start on Hanzlick or Stankus. Unless anybody else can pre-date that occurrence, I'm going with Mr. Waits on this one. Mr. Waits is da man.
posted by soyjoy at 11:21 AM on January 21, 2003

Lenny Bruce's "In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls."

Thanks Iconomy!

Let's hope, Linus.
posted by thomcatspike at 11:21 AM on January 21, 2003

The 'frontal lobotomy' quote is even noted by Hanzlick (who certainly is in line before Stankus, sorry sheauga) as derivative -- of bathroom graffiti. Earlier attributions are variously to Groucho Marx or Dorothy Parker, and it really makes more sense that it derives from an era when lobotomies were, in fact, a common treatment -- as many as 50,000 in the US between 1939 and 1951. The inventor won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949.

Despite depictions in popular entertainment such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the frontal lobotomy had largely been discarded by the 1970s, precisely because it was such a severe response, and with the advent of powerful anti-psychotics such as thorazine. (The Cuckoo's Nest novel dated from 1962, and depicted Kesey's professional experiences from the 1950s.) One of its main practitioners ceased the operation after a patient died in 1967. Today, a refined version of the technique is used for a vanishingly small number of patients.

As for spoonerisms, it's clearly a related form, but not all spoonerisms are chiasmic, and the spoonerism is generally understood as an unintentional malapropism -- while chiasmus is deliberate, even thought-provoking.

Vidiot, don't be so quick to judge. Political speech is one of the last holdouts of true rhetoric in contemporary society, and it has always made use of chiasmus and other nifty syntactical structures, viz. Lincoln's Farewell Address as he departed Springfield for Washington -- what's sometimes called Davidic Chiasmus. In other words, it certainly wasn't invented by Kennedy (said even by speechwriter Sorenson to be its "principal architect"), nor are those who use such devices turning only to the Kennedy address, but to the whole of rhetorical history.
posted by dhartung at 11:48 AM on January 21, 2003

Is everyone, including the original link above, confusing some instances of chiasmus with instances of spoonerism?

Rev. William Archibald Spooner... I'm related to that guy. My brush with fame (that and the guy that invented the phonograph needle). Anyway...
posted by Witty at 12:08 PM on January 21, 2003

Mike Tyson: A fighting buccaneer, or merely biting fucking ears?
posted by lazaruslong at 12:15 PM on January 21, 2003

dhartung - yep, I saw other attributions, including Groucho, Dorothy Parker and, on one page, "Starsky and Hutch," but I'm still sticking with Tom Waits because no online source has given me an actual, honest-to-god citation of when and where whoever it was said it, whereas I personally remember and can thus verify for my own purposes the legitimacy of the Waits citation. As far as I can tell, the quote hasn't made it into Bartlett's.

Sure, Tom Waits probably didn't make it up. Your argument about the obsolescence of lobotomies by the 70s is good. But he did say it on national TV (and doubtless had been saying it before that) long before the two songs previously cited as its "source" were written. Therefore I stand by my conculsion that Mr. Waits is da man.
posted by soyjoy at 12:21 PM on January 21, 2003

Thanks, iconomy, another spectacular link! And don't forget Tricky Dick's famous intonation: "When the going gets tough, the tough get going...."
posted by Lynsey at 12:31 PM on January 21, 2003

The difference between a women's track team, and a group of circus pygmies? The circus pygmies are cunning runts... Now if you will excuse me, I have to go burn my NOW card for contributing to the boyzone.
posted by headspace at 12:38 PM on January 21, 2003

--Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) American Musician, Guitarist, Singer, Songwriter

Yah, thanks. Had NO idea who Jimi Hendrix was.
posted by Satapher at 12:39 PM on January 21, 2003

On the back of my leather motorcycle jacket -

Hell's Librarians. Live to Read, Read to Live.

Yeah, I'm a nerd.
posted by bradth27 at 1:26 PM on January 21, 2003

A memorable line from a late, great man in an otherwise mediocre movie -

"I'd rather have a case of the clap than a case of this wine."
posted by boomchicka at 3:31 PM on January 21, 2003

And the difference between an oysterman with epilepsy and a hooker with the runs?

One shucks between fits....
posted by Wet Spot at 6:55 PM on January 21, 2003

And the difference between women and circuses?

One has cunning stunts ...

Going to MeFi hell for that one
posted by dg at 7:37 PM on January 21, 2003

You can take the kid out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the kid.
posted by Succa at 7:52 PM on January 21, 2003

Vidiot, don't be so quick to judge. Political speech is one of the last holdouts of true rhetoric in contemporary society, and it has always made use of chiasmus and other nifty syntactical structures,

Agreed, dhartung. There are lots of good political speeches out there. (even -- gasp! -- by politicians I don't agree with.) But I'd say that like most speeches, 95% of them are tired, hacklike crud that overuse tricks like chiasmus.
posted by Vidiot at 8:25 PM on January 21, 2003

My favorite is Frederick Douglass' "You have seen how a man became a slave, you will see how a slave became a man."
posted by themadjuggler at 10:19 PM on January 21, 2003

"In today's globalized world, if you don't visit a bad neighborhood, it will visit you." - Tom Friedman
posted by sheauga at 6:10 AM on January 23, 2003