[Ads-l] allegory

[Jonathan Lighter]

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."

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