syncrisis

English

Etymology

From Ancient Greek σύν (sún, “with, together”) + κρίσις (krísis, “judge”).

Noun

syncrisis (plural syncrises)

1. (rhetoric) A figure of speech in which opposite things or persons are compared.
   • 1984, Marie Kyralová, Symposium Comenianum 1982: The Impact of J.A. Comenius on Educational Thinking and Practice, page 19:

     Other aspects were also taken into consideration in the pansophic method, ensuing from the syncrisis of the general and particular.

   • 2007, Wendy Ellen Everett, Questions of Colour in Cinema: From Paintbrush to Pixel, page 134:

     Although it is tempting to look at colour in terms of each energia ^[sic] in turn (what could be said about a chromatic analysis of anemographia? ) for our purposes here, we will continue to focus on the temporal and spatial planes that articulate the figural cadences created by syncrisis.

   • 2010, Michael W. Martin, Judas and the Rhetoric of Comparison in the Fourth Gospel, page 32:

     Plutarch scholarship has long shown an intrest in syncrisis as described in the progymnasmata because of the convention's prominence in the Parallel Lives, which set individual Roman generals, politicians, etc., beside individual Greek generals, politicians, etc. in paired bioi, most of the pairs being followed by a formal, non-narrative comparison of the two figures.

Related terms

• syncritic

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “syncrisis”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)