![]() ![]() Affair Letters: Love letters that document someone had an extramarital affair.Affair Hair: The discovery of a strand of unfamiliar hair leads to accusations of infidelity.Affair? Blame the Bastard: Taking out your anger from your spouse's infidelity on the bastard child born of said infidelity.Accidental Adultery: A character cheated but was tricked, didn't know they were married, believed their partner to be dead, etc.Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: A character starts a relationship with someone else while physically separated from their love interest.These tropes explore infidelity, the forms it takes, and the effects that it has upon people. It has brought lovers together, but it has also torn lovers, marriages and even families apart, and it is one of the most common reasons for someone to end up killed. Whatever it's called, the act of having a romantic or sexual affair with someone other than one's established spouse or lover has ever been a source of drama in fiction and in real life. Which is probably what happened to “awful” and “terrific.” But here’s the kicker: Verbal irony is yet another rhetorical device.Adultery. The problem is that when the ironic form of the word becomes more common than the original form, the word’s accepted meaning essentially flips. Because verbal irony is when we use a word to mean its opposite for dramatic effect. Most recently, a decades-long battle over the word “literally” finally came to an end when dictionaries decided to include the secondary definition of “figuratively,” the word’s literal opposite.Īnd believe it or not, this is all the fault of irony. Go grammar snobs! But in the age of social media, it’s much more difficult to catch a straying word in time. Long story short, the pushback worked, insomuch as it made people afraid to continue using the word at all. So while rain on your wedding day isn’t ironic, writing a song called “Ironic” in which not a single lyrical example is ironic, is ironic. True irony isn’t just an outcome that wasn’t expected, but an outcome that is the exact opposite of what was expected. In 1996, Alanis Morrisette released a single called “ Ironic,” whose lyrics were filled with examples of what teenagers and twenty-somethings at the time understood ironic situations to be.īut when the song became a #1 hit, grammar snobs everywhere suddenly realized that an entire generation was using the word wrong. Yet sometimes a word in the process of evolving can be stopped dead in its tracks - which, incidentally, is a trope called an idiom. For example, the word “awful” originally meant “full of awe,” and “terrific” originally meant “full of terror.” Which might seem confusing, but this is just a natural part of the way language evolves. In fact, it’s more common than you might think. However, this wasn’t the first time a word changed in meaning through misuse. ![]() Out of these discussions came the creation of TV Tropes, and the rest was history. By 2004, the armchair analysts at were regularly using “trope” to mean a plot device rather than a rhetorical device. All metaphors were tropes.īut the word “trope” fell into such disuse that, when it was later rediscovered by amateur critics on the internet, it was primed for misinterpretation. Or to give you a period appropriate example, when Christ referred to God as “the Father,” writers called this “the metaphor of fatherhood” or “the trope of fatherhood,” because literary critics frequently used both words interchangeably. But, if the author had said that TV Tropes is “a Rickroll that traps you all day,” that would be a metaphor. For example, when XKCD said that TV Tropes is “like Rickrolling, but you’re trapped all day,” that was- well, that was a simile, which is a related trope. For example, if I were to say that TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life, that would be a form of exaggeration called hyperbole, which was classically considered a trope.Īnother classical trope was metaphor, which is when you say one thing is actually another thing. Well, traditionally a trope was considered to be any use of a rhetorical figure of speech. So what did the word “trope” originally mean? And yet, through years of collective misuse, this distorted version of the word became widely accepted as the correct form. Few of us knew what a “trope” was, but the way the website used the word was so intuitive that we all caught on quickly enough. What we never could’ve imagined is that the way TV Tropes used the word was actually completely incorrect. In the mid-2000s, a website called TV Tropes began to spread across the internet via word of mouth. ![]()
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