MARIANO TOMATIS

Transposable aphorisms from Pitigrilli to Marty Hines

During a recent interview held in Italy during the event La Repubblica delle Idee, Dan Brown paraphrased a well-known quote by Alfred Hitchcock. The next day, the newspaper Repubblica cited the aphorism in two different versions.

Left: “Life is like a novel without the boredom.” • Right: “A novel is like life without the boring parts.”

The writer had pronounced the sentence on the right (as I wrote here), but the curious mistake made me remember of the Italian writer Pitigrilli, who systematically reversed aphorisms with a polemic attitude. In his Dizionario antiballistico (“Dictionary against baloney”) (1) he proposed:

Many despise the riches but few know how to make a gift.
Many know how to make a gift but few despise the riches.

or even:

Happiness is in things, not in our taste.
Happiness is in our taste and not in things.

Often the truth of one does not overbear clearly the opposite. Umberto Eco noticed it, proposing the adjective “transposable” to define aphorisms which can be reversed this way:

A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny. [...] The transposable aphorism contains a very partial truth, and often after it has been reversed, it reveals to us that neither of its two propositions is true, it seemed true only because it was witty. (2)

Yet there are “forgivable” transposable aphorism: they are true also after the reversal, but in a non-obvious way. This is the case of the one quoted yesterday by Marty Hines on Twitter:

Autological is pentasyllabic. (3)

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