Have Some nerdsholmferret 9/12 '25

What animal is referred to by the word cervine?

What U.S. Civil War general has a style of facial hair named after him?

What does the unit pascal measure?

What Portuguese archipelago has a type of fortified wine named after it?

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9/12 11 Comments
Deer

Burnside

Pressure?

Madeira
CM Adams
Winner, winner, brownie sundae!
nerdsholmferret
Ran them all by my best teammate and she didn’t get any!
CM Adams
here i thought Madeira only referred to the island
rone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_Some_Madeira_M%27Dear
nerdsholmferret
Today I learned what zeugma is!
Lindsay Harris Friel
And learning is half the battle! The other half is remembering!
nerdsholmferret
I was very excited to note that, on her most recent album, Taylor Swift finally discovered zeugma and worked in two instances of it:

“You crashed my party and your rental car.”

And “was it hazing for an obscure fraternity I pledged and I still mean it that old habits die screaming”.

I especially appreciate the second one, not least because it took about 30 listens for me to catch it. But neither of course can hold a candle to the most famous musical example - that being the Humpty Dance’s “both how I’m living and my nose is large”.

Anyway…I hope on the new album, she starts using chiasmus.

CM Adams
I just googled “chiasmus,” and the Wikipedia definition says it’s “is a "reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses – but no repetition of words".

A similar device, antimetabole, also involves a reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses in an A-B-B-A configuration, but unlike chiasmus, presents a repetition of words.”

But, Google’s first search result was from the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, saying, “a rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, in the same or a modified form; e.g. ‘Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.’.”



Well, which is it, Internet? Chiasmus or timetable? Or is that for a doctor to decide?
Lindsay Harris Friel
I SAID ANTIMETABOLE NOT TIMETABLE wtf.
Lindsay Harris Friel
In Latin lit, it’s repeated words but with reversed order and sometimes different uses. (Or if the author is especially flamboyant, repeated PHRASES with reversed order.)

Example from modern lyrics would be some rap song I heard years ago with the lines:

“So I wait for [cant remember] to attack

Every time a car backfires I fire back.”

I think Polonius uses it in more than one place in Hamlet, but the example I’m trying to remember isn’t quite coming to me at the moment.
CM Adams