My (younger) brother sent this to me via Facebook and I am quite certain you’ll enjoy it. When I took a stab at finding the original post, I found that this list of jokes has been published lots and lots of times, so you may have seen it before. If so, I bet you still enjoy revisiting it. Here is a tiny handful of my favorites. but click through for the full list, which is way more extensive:
A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
I had to look up “chiasmus.” I mean, it’s clear from context, but I’ve never heard the term before, as far as I can remember. According to Google:
noun
- 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.’.
As I said, obvious from context. But had any of you encountered the term before?
This is three new-to-me words in two days — xyresic and fasciculating and now chiasmus. That’s an unusual frequency of new-to-me words!
I’ve run across chiasmus in analyses of Hebrew literary structures.
Without that I would have guessed something to do with X/Greek letter chi.
Those are good! My favorite:
The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
Lots of chiasmus in the Psalms, that I studied many many years ago. It is named after the greek letter X, because that’s the shape of the structure. A really short example is Matthew 6:24.
A No one can serve two masters,
B for either he will hate the one
C and love the other,
C′ or he will be devoted to the one
B′ and despise the other.
A′ You cannot serve God and money.
Thank you, Kim, that’s a great example to show the structure in a real context.