bolstering the cliche
We love our cliches and jingles, but there's something really satisfying about words and phrases that step out and step back, are mirror images of themselves--"level"--"radar"--"madam I'm Adam." These are palindromes, which means (in Greek) that they "run backward." In Latin the word would be "retrocourse."
But "it is what it is" isn't quite a palindrome, and so "palindrome" is not the word for this spell.
The word is "chiasmus"--a word named after a letter.
on Friday, 03 April 2015.
Posted in All About Words
there's no such thing as "start at the beginning"
My beautiful new blog is still a new blog, and I'm still learning its outlines and characters. A couple days ago, I discovered, quite by accident, that there was a comment box--with comments in it awaiting my approval!
Comments are now live; please post comments!
And so, with humble apologies to those commenters, this post is all about comments, the word and the abstract object.
Written by Ela Harrison
on Friday, 12 December 2014.
Posted in All About Words, Literary Citizenship