Fast Eddie: Yanked...
... because the linked document may be the most boring list of words every produced. I'll preserve the link here, in case someone needs help with their insomnia.
Ununnilium: Now, now. It's probably perfectly lucid to someone who already knows what semiotics, rhetoric, and Derrida are. ...why it's titled "Semiotics for Beginners", I don't know.
Mr Etaoin Shrdlu: Yes, and just because it's boring doesn't mean it has no place here. Like the rule for adding, say, hentai to
So Bad Its Horrible - if it's designed for a subculture and
despised by people outside that subculture, it doesn't count unless it
is also despised by people in that subculture.
RRH: I just clipped a couple paragraphs that
Sci Vo added to address some comments I made in
YKTTW arguing about the "true" meaning of trope. I removed them because I think they would make no sense to anyone who hadn't already read the conversation in
YKTTW. I don't think I can link to
YKTTW discussions, but look up Cliche Does Not Equal Trope.
I think the "thanks to philosophical trope theory" paragraph is definitely off-target. Literature is much more likely to import words from linguistics than from philosophy; poll a dozen literature professors and see how many of them can define synecdoche compared to how many can define physicalism.
The link that
Fast Eddie yanked is using, of course, what
Sci Vo would classify as the linguistics definition. I think the "literature vs. linguistics" divide is false, the real divide is between the pedantic and the layman. Anyone with an amateur interest in linguistics is going to be very pedantic about how a word is defined, so their usage is less prone to drift.
So, if there should be something added to this entry to address the definition of Trope that I was previously used to, I think it should say, yes or no, whether a trope needs to be defined in terms of conveying information to the audience. As an example, in
Meta Trope Intro, the example of using the brightness of an energy weapon to convey the power of the weapon would definitely be a trope, but "The butler did it" would be in dispute depending on how you address idea that a trope needs to convey information.
Sci Vo: Updated the entry to accurately reflect current usage.
