My earlier post about Sarah Palin's speech has received a good number of reads since I posted Sunday. I have another link for you. Slate has a piece that turns Palin's interview with Katie Couric into poetry.

Thanks to my colleague Judson Drennan for pointing this out.

I am fascinated by the language of vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and by the comments on it in the news and entertainment media.

Speeches in this year's presidential campaign are awash in a rhetorical device called antimetabole, according to an article in Slate.

In this device, the speaker repeats words in successive clauses in reverse grammatical order, as in President Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

I learned about the Slate piece in an "On the Media" segment, which linked to this definition. Slate cited a Wikipedia article about antimetabole, which explains the word's Greek origin. Follow the links above for more examples, and click here for a pronouncing guide.