#antimetabole

Turns out they have a name: the antimetabole.

Examples:

All for one and one for all!

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

The things you own end up owning you.

You can take the tiger out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the tiger.

I mean what I say and I say what I mean.

When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.

Laid back in my bed eating sausage

Sipping on gin and juice

With my mind on antimetabole

Like an MC Escher painting, an antimetabole can join up concepts we wouldn’t normally be open to connecting.

Psychology professor James Williams in his 2002 book Visions and Revisions argues that antimetaboles fit right into the grooves of our thought patterns.

“Given what we know about the mind, it would be weird in the extreme if antimetabole were not legion,” he argues.

The human mind is apt to conflate beauty with truth. When Watson and Crick finally lit upon the idea of the double helix structure for DNA in 1953, Watson knew they had the answer to their riddle. The double helix was too beautiful not to be true, he argued.