Language Log had a post discussing the Inaugural Address, and it included this passage. I thought of Wordsmith Talk because I know that many terms of rhetoric have been discussed here:

Quote:
Kennedy was the last president who could comfortably dip into the rich stew of classical figures of speech. “Not as a call to battle, though embattled we are” — that would be both chiasmus and polyptoton. Rhetoricians have been botanizing this stuff for millennia, and by now there's no way to put two words together that doesn't have a Greek label, kept alive by a thin line of English department pedants. There are 67 people in America who live for this stuff.