to "trope" [and deconstruct]

[Jonathan Lighter]

>>...we do not know what we are talking about.

The old man finally fessed up.

JL
On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 9:52 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: to "trope" [and deconstruct]
>
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>
> At 6/21/2009 09:30 PM, Jonathan Lighter 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.
> >
> >(The Civil War, Vietnam...just the infinite play of signs. No biggie.)
>
> Compare:
>
> In the recent book, "Philosophy in a Time of Terror," here is what he
> [Derrida] said about 9/11:
>         "We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this
> way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September11. The brevity of the
> appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or
> rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy -- a name, a
> number -- points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not
> recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify,
> that we do not know what we are talking about."
>         The rest is silence.
>
> The above is excerpted from The New York Times, Monday October 11,
> 2004, "An Appraisal: The Man Who Showed Us How to Take the World
> Apart", by Edward Rothstein.
>
> Joel
>
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