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Double-edged sword

Idiomatic Phrase
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Something that has both advantages and disadvantages; a situation or tool that can work for or against the user.

Detailed Definition
A weapon that cuts in both directions, this idiom elegantly captures the paradox of tools, gifts, and capacities that serve and harm simultaneously. In poetry, it describes freedom that isolates, intelligence that poisons joy, or beauty that attracts danger. Poets invoke it to explore the dual nature of power, language, love, and knowledge—the way the same instrument that enables also threatens. Its martial imagery gives it dramatic force, while its logical structure (both/and rather than either/or) suits philosophical verse. The phrase resonates especially in feminist and postcolonial poetry, where the double edge of liberation—its simultaneous promise and peril—is a recurring subject of lyric interrogation.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about the gift of heightened emotional sensitivity might describe it as a double-edged sword — the same intensity that produces the poem being indistinguishable from the suffering that the poem records; Keats's negative capability — the capacity to remain in uncertainty and doubt without irritable reaching after fact — is itself a double-edged sword: the openness that produces great poetry also exposing the poet to every current of ambient suffering; In a poem about freedom, the double-edged sword of liberation — its simultaneous promise and terror — cuts the poem through with genuine ambivalence that simple celebration would flatten; A feminist poem might describe intelligence, beauty, or professional success as a double-edged sword in a world that punishes women for the very qualities it claims to admire; In a political poem about revolutionary change, the double-edged sword of transformation cuts away both the oppressive structure and the familiar patterns of life that had organized around it, leaving a landscape of simultaneous possibility and grief; The martial imagery of the sword suits poems about language itself as a double-edged sword — capable of liberation and wound, of speaking truth to power and of being weaponized by power against the vulnerable
Additional Notes
This phrase is closely related to “a blessing and a curse,” but its weapon image gives it sharper danger. In poetry, a gift, talent, beauty, truth, or technology may cut both ways. It is especially effective when the poet develops blade imagery: gleam, edge, handle, wound, and the risk that the wielder is also harmed.
Also Known As
Mixed blessing Two-edged sword A blessing and a curse
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