What is chiasmus?

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What do you notice about the following quotes?

“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country”

“One should eat to live, not live to eat”

“All for one and one for all!”

“They take good care of their trucks because their trucks take good care of them.”

Notice anything about these quotes?

That’s right. They all use a phrase and then flip it around.

This inverted parallelism is called chiasmus - and it’s one of the most powerfully persuasive tools in the writer’s toolbox.

Chiasmus or (or chiasmus as it may also be pronounced) is named after CHI, the ancient Greek word for the letter X.

And that’s because the X shape captures the structure of the chiastic phrase, as these examples show.

Another way to think of them is as having an A-B-B-A pattern.

What makes this criss-cross word pattern so powerful?

There’s something about chiastic statements that sound clever and ingenious and hard to refute, isn’t there?

It’s hard not to nod sagely in agreement when someone makes the observation that if you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.

And that’s because a chiastic phrase has balance. But the inverted parallelism also contains an element of surprise and often playfulness. For example:

“It’s not the men in my life that count. It’s the life in my men.”

Chiasmus works by forcing us to rethink the relationships between things or ideas. To look at them anew.

At the same time, the balancedness of the construction makes us feel the new relationship should have been obvious to us all along.

It’s persuasive because the parallelism speaker appears to have uncovered a self-evident truth that was there all along, if only we’d been smart enough to see it all along.