parallelism

Definition:

Similarity of structure in a pair or series of related words, phrases, or clauses. See also:

• Antithesis
• Parison
• Series
• "Of Studies," by Francis Bacon

Etymology:

From the Greek, "beside one another"

Examples:

• "The more we do, the more we can do."
  (William Hazlitt)



• "Voltaire could both lick boots and put the boot in. He was at once opportunist and courageous, cunning and sincere. He managed, with disconcerting ease, to reconcile love of freedom with love of hours."
  (Dominique Edde)



• "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s precisely the opposite."
  (John Kenneth Galbraith)



• "Truth is not a diet but a condiment."
  (Christopher Morley)



• "When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative."
  (Martin Luther King, Jr.)



• "Our transportation crisis will be solved by a bigger plane or a wider road, mental illness with a pill, poverty with a law, slums with a bulldozer, urban conflict with a gas, racism with a goodwill gesture."
  (Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness)



• "I don’t want to live on in my work. I want to live on in my apartment."
  (Woody Allen)



• "Buy a bucket of chicken and have a barrel of fun."
  (slogan of Kentucky Fried Chicken)



• "The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig."
  (E. B. White, "Death of a Pig")



• "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."
  (T.S. Eliot)



• "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."
  (Tom Robbins)



• "Today's students can put dope in their veins or hope in their brains. If they can conceive it and believe it, they can achieve it. They must know it is not their aptitude but their attitude that will determine their altitude."
  (Jesse Jackson)

Pronunciation: PAR-a-lell-izm