"Trope" Aaaarrrgghhh!!!!

[teamsaint]

In the nineties we seemed to have paradigms, particularly shifts in them …
Then in the noughties it became necessary for all academic papers and lectures to include tropes …
Now we seem to be awash with memes …

It's the current zeitgeist.....

[Bryn]

It's the current zeitgeist.....

Just gove 'em t'rope to 'ang 'emselves

[ardcarp]

The world of education has always been awash with buzz-words. The current one is 'learning'. It might seem a rather obvious and ordinary word in the circumstances, but we have 'learning walks' [head-teacher going round the school] and 'Now go to your learning' [back to the classroom]. And the last letter home, sent to parents via a grand-child, had 'learning' in it 7 times.

[burning dog]

And the last letter home, sent to parents via a grand-child, had 'learning' in it 7 times.

Their school Anthem could be this ....but I doubt it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k1m1ITcljM

[jean]

A "trope" on the other hand has for a very long time denoted "any literary or rhetorical device, as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, that consists in the use of words in other than their literal sense." So it's more general than the term "metaphor". It does seem to have suddenly become much more popular than before, though.

All true- and the word has been so used since the very beginnings of rhetoric itself.

Indeed if rhetoric had not become so unfashionable, I have no doubt we would still know what we were supposed to be talking about, nor imagine a trope to be something new - especially when we set about re-inventing those antisemitic ones!

...For rhetoric, he could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope;
And when he happened to break off
I’ th’ middle of his speech, or cough,
H’ had hard words ready to show why,
And tell what rules he did it by;
Else, when with greatest art he spoke,
You’d think he talked like other folk.
For all a rhetorician’s rules
Teach nothing but to name his tools...

[Serial_Apologist]

Their school Anthem could be this ....but I doubt it


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k1m1ITcljM

But they only need a little learning!

[ardcarp]

Their school Anthem could be this ....but I doubt it


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k1m1ITcljM

Ah! When contemporary music really was! [discuss]

[Demetrius]

Trope = story telling device. An extremely general term that can mean basically anything, thus a great way of saying nothing in particular, which is why literature students love it.

If the term comes up in conversations more than it used to, it is likely due to the success of the website TV tropes, which tries to trace when and where story telling devices of any kind are used in stories (or in real life, in fact; like in this case:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...ic/EdwardElgar). This thing is one of the deepest pools of useless knowledge I've ever encountered.

[Nick Armstrong]

Certain word suddenly become buzz words. Now that 'existential' has been done to death [!], 'trope' seems to be used by the trendy set, meaning, I suppose (ironically) a significant or recurrent theme or motif.

Yes and 'dystopian' is in the same category for me, at the moment and over recent months...

[robk]

I remember an Astragal cartoon in The Architect's Journal many years ago with a caption "I think I have a paradigm in my soup". That one seems to have slipped away for now.