Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Taking The Victim As You Find Them

File this one under "why the Scottish legal system is better than the English one."

In Yorkshire, a group of teenaged girls, of the repugnant bullying variety that end up pregnant by 15 [Edit: it turns out that one of them has done exactly this] and living off us taxpayers for the rest of their miserable and pointless lives, decided that they would physically attack another girl.  This girl, a fifteen year-old called Aimee Wellock, suffered from an undiscovered heart defect, and died as a result of the attack.  Originally convicted of manslaughter, the attackers have just had their convictions quashed, since in English law it was the heart defect and not the actual attacks that lead to death.

Well, in Scotland we know causality when we see it.  Were these barely-bipedal vermin to have committed their crime in Scotland, they would have ended up doing several years for culpable homicide (the Scottish equivalent of manslaughter).  Here, we have a principle, first established in a similar case of attack followed by heart failure, which covers exactly this.  You are said to take the victim as you find them.  England might take a lead on this one.

You keep using that word...

I am a pedant.  And proud of it.  And no, you lot in the burger-eating, sink-estate lynch mob in the corner, pedantry has nothing to do with children.

Today's pedantic outburst, the use of which has been gnawing at me for a couple of years now, is the word "trope".

In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya: "you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

The cause of my rage finally boiling over takes the unlikely, and insubstantial, form of Tycho from Penny Arcade.  He uses the word "trope", in today's posting, in the classic abuse thereof: meaning a frequently-used sequence or theme in comics or cartoons.  An example of this incorrect usage would include its use to describe a character running off a cliff, coming to a halt in mid-air, turning to cameras, gulping, and suddenly plummeting downwards out of shot.  If a hat can be left behind for a second, and a directly-downwards shot can then show a small puff of dust miles below at the base of the cliff, so much the better.

That is not an example of a trope.  A trope is simply the non-literal use of a word or phrase.  In other words, using a word in such a way as to enhance, alter, or even reverse the normal meaning of that word or phrase.  If I was to "dance around the subject" of tropes, that would itself be a trope: metaphors are types of tropes.  If I talked of having to be "cruel to be kind", then that - an oxymoron - would be a trope.  If I said that I found Tycho's writing to be "not unpleasant" then that - as well as being an understatement - would be a trope ( in their litotes guise).

The word is particularly abused by followers of that accursed religion, critical theory.  They use it to sound clever, and the best that we can say is that they are using it as a trope in and of itself: a figurative and non-literal use of the word "trope".  A meta-trope, as it were.  Just between ourselves, I suspect that they'd probably rather like that.

But tropes are nothing gnostic, nor are they the exclusive property of those who abuse the term.  We all use tropes, all the time.  Puns are tropes.  Similes are tropes.  A paradox, properly expressed, is a trope, as is a euphemism.  Irony and hyperbole and even, sometimes, onomatopoeia are all forms of tropes.

I suppose that I should be awfully predictable and finish this off, self-referentially, with a trope.  But I refuse to go gilding any lilies.