Chiasmus, Cole Porter, and Malcolm X
This Malcolm X quote was on the front page of today's "Insight" section of the San Francisco Chronicle:
We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters —
Plymouth Rock landed on us!"
This reminded me of the intro to Cole Porter's Anything Goes, one of a few songs from that era that I know the words to.
Times have changed
And we've often rewound the clock
Since the Puritans got a shock
When they landed on Plymouth Rock.
If today any shock they should try to stem
'Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth Rock would land on them.
(When my wife turned 30, we had a "Thirties Party",
with martinis, Astaire/Rogers films, and thirties music
that I put together from LPs, tapes, and even taping one
via a microphone, from a video running on our TV.
Very fun, and I learned several of the songs from that
tape; I can still sing three or four of them.)
According to
Dr Mardy Grothe's Chiasmus site, Porter wasn't even
the first to commit that particular switcheroo to print.
Chiasmus is ... "A grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two of parallel clauses is inverted in the other."
Delving deeper into the cataloging of kinds of figures
of speech, one of my favorites is "tmesis". Try looking at
some of the pages that come up when you ask Google for pages
that include both "tmesis" and "chiasmus". I wonder how long
it'll take for this blog entry to get up into that list.
It's too bad that the tmesis example on
this page is in Latin. In fact, it's un-freaking-believable!
11:42:38 PM
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