If you found this video by searching for the meaning of the word “trope,” chances are you came
across two very different definitions before you got here, and both of them are used in literary
settings. The first defines trope as a catch-all term for figures of speech that say one thing
while artfully and imaginatively implying another. We’ve explored a lot of these tropes in this
very video series: words like metaphor, simile, allegory, synecdoche, and so forth. “Juliet is the
sun!” says Romeo. This is a trope, specifically, it's a type of trope called a metaphor.
The other meaning of the word “trope” is a storytelling convention, device, or motif;
specific tropes might be a characteristic of a particular genre of storytelling. For instance,
one trope you see all over the place in folktales is “the rule of three” – where
three characters or events create a predictable pattern (usually, two failures and a success).
We might think of the Three Little Pigs, the magic lamp that grants three wishes, Goldilocks and the
Three Bears, Cinderella and her two stepsisters, and so on. Or there might be character tropes,
like the “manic pixie dream girl” – a quirky female character who “exists solely in the
fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace
life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." [Nathan Rabin, 2007] This stock character was
pretty popular in the early 2000s, but garnered enough negative media attention that it became
a cliche, and doesn’t tend to show up in media as often anymore unless it's being satirized.
Now, the first definition of the word trope – the one that calls a trope a “figure of speech” – is the one you’re
likely to find in writing books and websites, like the Silva Rhetoricae, an online encyclopedia of
literary terms and figures; the second one – the one that defines it as a convention – is
more likely to show up in spaces devoted to popular analysis of media, like TVTropes.com.
So, why these two definitions? And which one is the “real” one? Well,
it depends on your perspective. The definition of “trope” as a “narrative convention” has its first
attestation in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1975; that’s pretty recent. Meanwhile,
the definition of “trope” as “a figure of speech” goes at least as far back as Aristotle,
where the Greek τρόπος means turn, way, or manner: in essence, a turn of language. Tropes like
metaphors and similes help us to express new ideas without needing new words – coming up with unique
words for all of the ideas we have in a day would be impossible – and tropes like this also help us do it with
artistry and imagination, like verbal thunder, shocking us out of our normal, everyday speech.
Not only are these two definitions of trope both useful,
they’re related, and they are a great example of semantic shift.
Semantic shift is when a word changes meaning or we change how it is used over time.
When Romeo asks “What light through yonder window breaks?” and then answers “It is the east,
and Juliet is the sun,” he’s using a type of trope called a metaphor, which you can learn
more about at the link in the description box. But this is a really boring metaphor; Romeo is,
after all, a teenager composing angsty teenage poetry about his crush. We’ve all been there.
And that’s how “trope” in the first sense became “trope” in the second sense.
As figures of speech get used over and over and then become commonplace, they become less
poetically powerful but perhaps more structurally important to our language and how we express our
ideas, less an ornament of language and more how the language signals to its readers, viewers,
or listeners that it is a specific genre or form. (The semantic shift between definition
one of trope and definition two of trope also probably had something to do with the rise of
a type of theory called structuralism and some pretty influential books that came out in the
20th century that looked at how the structure of language works, like Saussure’s Course in General
Linguistics (1916), Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), and Christopher
Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots (2004), but that’s beyond the scope of this video).
At any rate, both senses of the word “trope” are useful, and I think the semantic shift
between a trope as “a turn of phrase that is beautiful and makes you think” to trope as “a
narrative convention” reveals something about how we play with language – when we write,
we’re always balancing the new and the familiar, the literal and the figurative.
I’ve only given a couple examples of tropes here.
What are your favorite tropes? And what are your least favorite ones?