Some champagne for my real friend, some real pain for my sham friends."
Is there a name for this kind of sentence?
Note: I'm not sure the origin of this, but it is a line in Spike Lee's movie, 25th Hour
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6Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things. – Neil Apr 22 '11 at 20:40
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6I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. – thursdaysgeek Apr 22 '11 at 22:23
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3The people who mind don't matter; the people who matter don't mind. – mfe Apr 23 '11 at 00:54
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2"Too fucking busy, and vice-versa." -- Dorothy Parker – Michael Lorton Apr 23 '11 at 02:30
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In Spanish there is a very nice "collection" of these beasts, usually with a structure like (innocent phrase)<->(reversed and dirty phrase). They usually goes like "It is not the same ..(1).. than ..(2)..". Some of them are really funny, and it is enough to mention the first part for your audience to imagine the second. – Dr. belisarius Apr 23 '11 at 07:28
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Working hard or hardly working? – dting Apr 23 '11 at 21:31
2 Answers
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Looks like a chiasmus or an antimetabole to me, with a pun thrown in for good measure.
In rhetoric, chiasmus (from the Greek: χιάζω, chiázō, "to shape like the letter Χ") is the figure of speech in which two or more clauses are related to each other through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point; that is, the clauses display inverted parallelism. [...] Today, chiasmus is applied fairly broadly to any "criss-cross" structure, although in classical rhetoric it was distinguished from other similar devices, such as the antimetabole.
The most famous example probably being
But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first. (Matthew 19:30.)
RegDwigнt
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To be clear: The chiasmus here is the use of sham/real and not pain/friends, yes? "Sham [x] for my real [y]; real [x] for my sham [y]." – MrHen Apr 22 '11 at 19:56
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2My 12-year-old loved antimetabole and would point them out when she heard them. One character in the the Ben Stiller/William H. Macy flop Mystery Men speaks entirely in antimetabole until Stiller shrieks at him in frustration. – Michael Lorton Apr 23 '11 at 02:29
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can you indicate which of the sentences in the question's comments qualify as a chiasmus? – Louis Rhys Apr 23 '11 at 07:40
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In English, this type of pun is called a Spoonerism. In German, it's called a Schüttelreim.
Peter Shor
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7It should be noted that a Schüttelreim is actually a rhyme, the German word for spoonerism being, unsurprisingly, Spoonerismus. – RegDwigнt Apr 22 '11 at 23:01
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6It is not a Spoonerism (it's antimetabole). A Spoonerism is an accidentally swapping of sounds, which some times produces valid words (Dr Spooner once referred to the dear old Queen as the "queer old dean") and sometimes not (once he quoted a verse about "conquering kings" as "kinkering kongs"). – Michael Lorton Apr 23 '11 at 02:25
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@Malvolio: While Spooner may have used the speech pattern accidentally, it is used to describe similar deliberate wordplay today. – Apr 23 '11 at 12:15
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@JoeWresching -- do you have a cite for that? I'm not saying you're wrong, I have just never seen it. The world is so full of a number of things, I 'm sure we should all be as happy as kongs... – Michael Lorton Apr 23 '11 at 16:16
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@Malvolio: I have never before heard the claim it must be accidental - just that they often are. The linked Wikipedia article as well as wikitionary both explicitly say it may be deliberate. The classic "frontal lobotomy" Spoonerism is certainly not accidental. – Apr 23 '11 at 16:39