to "trope"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 9:30 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> OED has this transitive verb,but not in the present sense: "to turn into or
> to employ as a metaphor or other rhetorical figure" (I think).
>
> 2001 Lidia Yuknivitch _Allegories of Violence_ (N.Y.: Routledge) 10: [I]
> suggest that we read war as a trope, a figure of thought on which meaning
> turns. The writing of war, the troping of war happens at the level of
> narrative language.

I used an ad-hoc intransitive in the title of a 2007 Language Log
post, "Stop him before he tropes again" (about Al Gore and the "crisis
= danger + opportunity" trope):

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004330.html


--Ben Zimmer

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