Antimetabole, or, at Republican National Convention, language inverts YOU!!

For those of you who like these things, or who survived CL 212, or who can't get enough of political rhetoric: Juliet Lapidos at Slate has a piece on antimetabole, the trendy figure of speech that's all the rage at the RNC. It's like chiasmus on steroids. Example, courtesy of John McCain: "We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us." This blog is about language and style, not politics, so I'll just leave it that.

For those of you who grew up during the Cold War, or have loved ones who did, or who remember the heyday of Yakov Smirnoff: google "soviet russia jokes" for much funnier uses of antimetabole in the "Russian Reversal". Example (say it with a fake Russian accent, à la Lampeto in Henderson's translation of Thesmo): "In America, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, party finds YOU!!".

Latin and Greek Treebank Data at Perseus

This is basically a linkdump for my own future reference, but I don't begrudge the project a little (er, very little) extra publicity, either.

A "treebank" is a database of syntactical structures used by linguists. Thanks to a post on the Stoa Consortium, I found out that the Perseus Project is soliciting help in compiling such a database for the numerous Greek and Latin texts that it contains. They suggest that it could be incorporated into a classroom project.

The Stoa Consortium, by the way, is the wave of the future. It is a collaborative effort dedicated to finding ways to integrate technology and classics, and has an open-source attitude.