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antimetabole (an-ti-muh-TAB-uh-lee) - n., a figure of speech in which the same words or ideas are repeated in inverse order.


"When the going gets tough, the tough get going." "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." A special form of chiasmus -- the latter is any sort of ABBA structure, including sounds and syntactic forms, as well as words. Can also be thought of as antiparallelism. Like most rhetorical terms, adopted directly from the Ancient Greeks who named it, literally "turning about in the opposite direction."

---L.

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