Lexical retrieval woes
Sophie Harrison, reviewing Peter Nadas's
Fire and Knowledge,
NYT Book Review, 9/7/07, p. 19:
No one writes a palindromic phrase like
Nadas. On writing: "The ideal literary sentence may be born of
imagination or experience, but it must gauge its imagination within its
experience and its experience within its imagination." Melancholy is
"the sensation of a void of knowledge or an awareness of a void of
sensation."
Harrison then adds one of her own:
The discovery that there is an essay
titled "Hamlet is Free" brings a feeling of sinking or a sinking of
feeling, depending on how one looks at it.
But these are instances of chiastic phrases, not palindromic
ones.
Chiasmus and palindromes both involve reversals, but in very different
ways. In chiasmus, X ... Y is paired with Y ... X, while a
palindrome reads the same forwards or backwards (either
character-by-character or word-by-word). So chiasmus vaguely
resembles word palindromes, like these examples supplied to the
American Dialect Society mailing list by Ben Zimmer in response to my
posting there about Harrison's "palindromic phrase"):
So patient a doctor to doctor a patient
so.
Girl, bathing on Bikini, eyeing boy, finds boy eyeing bikini on bathing
girl.
You can cage a swallow, can't you, but you can't swallow a cage, can
you?
Bores are people that say that people are bores.
Women understand men; few men understand women.
More examples
here.
Note that word palindromes (for sentences with at least four words) will necessarily have chiastic parts.
But the examples from Nadas and Harrison are not word
palindromes. And what most speakers of English think of when they
hear "palindrome" is the character palindrome, as in the palindromic
words "level" and "civic" and the character-palindromic sentences "Able
was I ere I saw Elba" and "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" -- but these
are even more distant from chiasmus than word palindromes are.
It looks like Harrison reached into her stock of technical terms and
pulled out a wrong (but semantically related) one. This is a
surprising error from someone who makes a living as a free-lance
writer, including reviewing books (mostly fiction and criticism,
apparently) for a variety of reputable publications:
The New York Times,
The Guardian,
Granta,
The London Review of Books,
The New Statesman, and so on.
But then we've complained here many times about people whose
professional lives concern language in a significant way but who misuse
the technical terminology of grammar, rhetoric, poetics, historical
linguistics, etc.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at October 11, 2007 02:28 PM