A question from Ask Figaro:
Working hard or hardly working. Or, One trains minds, the other minds trains. What figure of speech are these examples of?
Dear R,
It’s one of Figaro’s faves, the antistasis. It repeats a word while changing its meaning. The antistasis (an-TIS-ta-sis) works especially well if you give it a chiasmus spin, making one clause mirror another. The Bard himself liked the device: “I wasted time and now time doth waste me.”
Or, as one of Figaro’s student friends would say, “I wasted time and then got wasted.”
Fig.