A Figure of Speech Common in Classical Greek, Occasional in English

Greek is highly inflected, far more than English, so for classical Greek, word order is pretty flexible, and poets liked to use this figure of speech. It’s called chaismus. It means using a phrase twice, once in reverse order. Here’s an example in English. Only two words, but that’s English for you.

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Last panel. “Prove” in this old usage means to test, not to show that something is true. The kid got it right!

“The exception proves the rule” does not mean that you demonstrate the truth of something by making an exception to it. That’s nonsense. “The exception proves the rule” means that when you break the rule you test whether it’s actually a rule by whether you get into trouble or not. If you get into trouble, yup, it’s a rule. If you get away with it, then it’s not really a rule.

Two examples of two in a row in the cartoon; second and third panels:

You might know that technically, the word that looks like a preposition is really an adverb when you have a separable verb (such as “put up” and “stress out.”) And these adverbs can go at the end of a sentence, such as “put ’em up” and “Don’t stress me out.”

But what about when you have more than one? The kid’s “up with” feels like an adverb, but the teacher’s “over” feels like a preposition. After all, she could have ended the sentence with “over this.” That gives “over” an object. Maybe we have some flexibility here. The longest series of prepositions I know of is five:

Come on up to over by the picnic table.

Where would you say the adverbs stop and the prepositions begin? Can you come up with a longer series? Feel free to put something in the comments.

A mondegreen is when you misinterpret the words to a song. I’m not much on pop culture, so I’ve never heard of Chris Isaak, but you should still get the joke.

So do you have a favorite mondegreen? Put it in the comments. BTW, look up “mondegreen” in the search box for some other posts on this subject, including the reason we call it a mondegreen.

This struck me as a good illustration of having different points of view about the same topic. Not a lot else to say.
—Except to point out that the English teacher gets “whom” correct.

How do you feel about rainbows?