What figure of speech is this? "Homes to the homeless, jobs to the jobless"

What figure of speech is this?

Homes to the homeless, jobs to the jobless

Solution 1:

The online Oxford Dictionary offers as the meaning of figure of speech:-

a word or phrase used in a non-literal sense for rhetorical or vivid effect.

Your examples are not really examples of figures of speech on that definition. So I tried the Oxford Companion to the English Language. This tells us that the phrase is a translation of Latin figura orationis, which is in turn the Latin version of the Greek σχημα της λεξεως (schēma tēs lexeōs). It defines the term more broadly as:-

a rhetorical device that achieves a special effect by using words in distinctive ways, such as alliteration, in which the same sound, especially an initial consonant is repeated ... and hyperbole, as in the phrase tons of money ('a great deal of money').

And on it goes, citing thirty two more! One that is not cited is FumbleFingers' parallelism, but it is certainly appropriate to the OP's example. It includes a lot of repetition, not of words so much as of structure. So it has two parts of identical metric value (tum-ti-ti tum-tum), which happen to constitute the final two feet of the hexameter. It also involves repetition of the words home and job. More to the point, it uses contrast ) between home and its (sort of) opposite homeless. These are all parallel elements, so I am only really confirming what FumbleFingers has suggested. Perhaps also, we could there is a kind of anaphora, which is only the Greek work for repetition, which is only the Latin for ... repetition.

So it is a very good slogan, because it is simple, direct and memorable.