to "trope" [and deconstruct]

[Wilson Gray]

Well, that certainly clears up a lot of questions that I had. I'll be
sleeping like a baby, tonight!

-Wilson

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 9:52 PM, Joel S. Berson<Berson at att.net> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: to "trope" [and deconstruct]
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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:
> Â  Â  Â  Â  "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."
> Â  Â  Â  Â  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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--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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