It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog is an example of the rhetorical device called antimetabole, from Greek words that mean “a turning about.” Other examples include When the going gets tough, the tough get going and Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Antimetabole involves inverting the words in a statement, and it’s a subset of chiasmus, which can also involve inverting the syntax or structure or ideas, as in the line from Martin Luther King Jr’s. famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Injustice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere. The word chiasmus derives from the X-shaped Greek letter chi. For a popular book about chiasmus, check out Never Let a Kiss Fool You or a Fool Kiss You (Amazon) by Mardy Grothe. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “We Learn Language, Then Use Language to Learn: Antimetabole and Chiasmus”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name is Ben.
I’m calling from Chicago.
So I was calling in about a construction of language that I’ve heard before, and I’ve actually worried, or not worried, but wondered about for years.
And the phrase that we’ve all heard, I think, is it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.
And I was wondering if you guys had any information about that.
Yeah, what you’re talking about, what was the one that you used?
It’s not the…
It’s not the size of the dog in the fight. It’s the size of the fight in the dog.
Size of the fight in the dog. Yeah, where the words in the first half of the sentence are inverted in the second half of the sentence.
And that’s a really pithy, memorable way of getting a point across.
And there are a couple of rhetorical terms that we can talk about, one of which is antimetaboli.
This is an example of antimetaboli, which isn’t one of your long-lost relatives.
It’s spelled A-N-T-I-M-E-T-A-B-O-L-E, anti-metabole.
And that comes from Greek words that mean something like opposite turning about or opposite change.
So you gave us one example, Ben, and another one would be when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Or, you know, the famous one from JFK when he said, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
And antimetabole is a subcategory of a rhetorical device called chiasmus, which is another wonderful Greek-derived word.
If you’re using chiasmus, you’re not repeating the words exactly, but you’re taking a couple of phrases and just kind of inverting the second one in terms of the idea.
For example, when Martin Luther King was writing his letter from a Birmingham jail, he wrote, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
So anti-metabole is a subcategory of chiasmus.
So anti-metabole inverts the words, and chiasmus in general can just be inverting the syntax or structure.
Yeah, yeah, or the ideas.
Antimetabolism is sort of like a palindrome made out of words.
And the other cool thing about chiasmus is that it comes from the Greek letter chi, or in Greek chi, C-H-I, like sigma chi, which is shaped like an X.
And actually, there’s a whole book about chiasmus called Never Let a Fool Kiss You or a Kiss Fool You.
So the idea about that X is it’s about these phrases kind of crossing in the middle or these clauses crossing in the middle.
That’s really cool.
I had no idea about any of those words before, and this is very educational.
Thank you.
Ben, thank you so much for your call.
We really appreciate it, and thanks for listening.
Thank you both.
This is great.
Thank you.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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