Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Misused
, started by Malady on Aug 28th 2020 at 4:34:57 AM
I think the page quote should be the E V E R Y O N E ! ! ! line from The Professional.
So, I'm just curious: According to the standards of this page, would this line from Parks and Recreation be permissible?
"Just give me all the bacon and eggs you have... Wait, wait. I worry what you just heard was, 'Give me a lot of bacon and eggs.' What I said was, 'Give me all the bacon and eggs you have.' Do you understand?"
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Since it's not hyperbole, but it looks like it is at first, it might be a Playing With example (subversion, possibly?).
But it's definitely not a "straight" example.
I deleted some examples listed here, and another user added them back and asked what was wrong with them. Here is what I am thinking. It strikes me that this trope applies when "all of them" is used facetiously or sarcastically to describe an amount that is too high to count or estimate. This trope should NOT apply when the answer is LITERALLY "all of them", that is, when there is a finite amount of something and every example of that something is present and accounted for.
Here is the difference. In the page quote, John Connor is asked how many police there are outside, and answers "all of them". Obviously every policeman in the world is not waiting outside that building. This is a facetious use of "all of them" to indicate a large amount, so this trope applies. In the "Comics" section, Cerberus the Aardvark describes the amount of money he wants as "all of it". Of course he cannot actually get all of the money in the world. So this is another example of when the trope applies.
In the examples that I deleted, there is a finite amount of things that we are talking about and it IS possible to be literally describing "all of them". In Chicken Run there are only so many chickens on Mrs. Tweedy's farm and it is actually possible to get "all of them". In Robin Hood Guy only had a finite amount of soldiers and it was actually possible to lose "all of them". In "Lean on Me" there are only so many students in the school and it is actually possible for "all of them" to march to city hall. Therefore I deleted those examples.
Let me know if this makes sense and, if so, how the definition can be written to make this more clear.
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What? I thought the trope was about the number being large, not infinite.
Yes and No. The trope is when someone is saying "All of them" to refer not literally to all of whatever item is being described- though it can, in fact, be literally true- but that the number of said items is large enough that it may as well be all of them.
It seems to me that there are two different ways to use "all of them". The first would be if there is a discrete group of items and you mean it literally. I give my friend four cupcakes and tell him to eat, he asks me how many he should eat, and I say "all of them". The other is the figurative use of "all of them" to mean "way too many to count", as shown in the quote from Terminator2 included on the main page. I have deleted those examples that seem plainly to be the first, literal use of this phrase, since the trope description clearly intends the second, figurative use.
Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: What is this supposed to be?
, started by vilefile on Feb 25th 2011 at 5:20:29 AM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman