Chiastic Quotes
I'm planning a short story that includes a girl speaking in Irish brogue. I decided to research the dialect on the internet and found this website about Chiastic Quotes. Of course, I didn't know what they were, but the site gives this definition from the Oxford dictionary -- Chiasmus: "A grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two of parallel clauses is inverted in the other." Anyhow, on the page I linked to (above) Finley Peter Dunneand is featured as the man who started the famous quote about newspapers - "To comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable." This original version is provided on the site:
"Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us.
It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks,
commands th' milishy, conthrols th' ligislachure,
baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish,
comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable,
buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward."
The expression has been borrowed and altered in many ways over the
years.
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