[Ads-l] allegory

[Jonathan Lighter]

2010
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/film/lebanon-the-best-movie-of-the-year-6367660
  :
Maoz's cine-memoir is at once political allegory and existential combat
movie — Sartre's No Exit as directed by Sam Fuller.

In this movie (_Lebanon_), an untried  Israeli tank crew rolls into Lebanon
in 1982. People on both sides get killed, and at the end. the tank is seen
in a field of sunflowers.

Allegory?  Of what?

JL

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 8:02 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Whoa.  Should have been:
>
> "The combat genre reshuffles a series of potent mythologies containing
> valiant heroes, dangerous quests, malevolent villains, recognizable
> iconographies, repeated narrative patterns, and recurring conventions to
> design compelling allegories to define themselves and identify America's
> salient values."
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 7:46 PM Stanton McCandlish <smccandlish at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 1:00 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> [...] But the point here is that the word "allegory" is used in a highly
>> dilute
>> form not yet recognized by OED.
>>
>>
>> Maybe "allegory" is a new "ironic".
>>
>> Several other high-falutin' words get misused in a similar way
>> ("literally", "metaphoric", "proverbial", "methodology", etc.). It's as if
>> the writer/speaker knows that the word can fit into similar sentences and
>> is used by others within the same topic area, but they don't actually know
>> the precise meaning.
>>
>> It may relate to buzzwording in management and other professional circles
>> ("paradigm", "sustainable", "empowering", "synergistic", etc.) – a form of
>> pseudo-intellectualism.
>>
>> It seems distinct from the more slang-induced sort of meaning shift. E.g.,
>> when my mother used "awesome", it was closer to the original sense; a
>> millennial would not properly understand "an awesome explosion" as
>> something frightful, while someone my age is apt to find it potentially
>> ambiguous (our generation introduced the positive sense, but knew the
>> older
>> one, too). Shifts like that seem to come from intentional meaning
>> distortions in the then-contemporary youth culture; viz. "cool" turning
>> into "rad[ical]" in the 1980s, and odder expressions later, like "sick".
>> The weirdest one I heard was "retarded" in the same sense of "impressive
>> in
>> a with-it, hip way". I only ever encountered it in Toronto in the
>> mid-2000s, but haven't really looked further.
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org