trope

noun

1. Something recurring across a genre or type of art or literature; a motif.

   “They have completely supported the Russians diplomatically, they’ve abstained in key votes at the United Nations, they’ve absolutely cynically repeated all the Russian tropes, particularly in places like Africa and Latin America – [by]^([sic]) blaming Nato and all of this stuff.”

   “Contrary to the familiar trope that regulation kills innovation, Harding argues that in fact the political, moral and legal clarity provided by the Warnock commission spurred investment and economic growth.”

2. An addition (of dialogue, song, music, etc.) to a standard element of the liturgy, serving as an embellishment.

   “Usually known as 'tropes,' these interpolations consisted at first of but a few words; those of the Introit at the beginning of Mass on great festivals, however, often took the form of dialogues.”

   “In the broadest sense tropes are all the later musical and textual accretions to the Franco-Roman nucleus of antiphonal and responsorial chants for mass and offices that we call Gregorian chant, a repertoire primarily fixed by the early 9th century. A trope might be a newly added textless melody (a melisma), text added to a preexistent melisma (a prosula), or newly composed text and melody added to an older item as an introduction or interpolation (a trope per se).”

3. (rhetoric)A figure of speech in which words or phrases are used with a nonliteral or figurative meaning, such as a metaphor.

   “Since the tories have thus disappointed my hopes, / And will neither regard my figures nor tropes; I'll speech against peace while Dismal's my name, / And be a true whig, while I'm Not-in-game.”

   “Law is the rule of human conduct. When this term is applied in reference to the governing principles of all actions, inanimate as well as animate, and arising from impulse or necessity, as well as from volition, it is used figuratively, as a trope, rather than in its true and literal signification—as when we say, the laws of motion, the laws of gravitation, the laws of vegetable or animal life.”

4. Mathematical senses.

   “Hence the section must be a conic passing through six nodes, that is, the plane touches the surface all along a conic, and is therefore a trope. The complete section of the surface by a trope is a conic counted twice; since this passes through six nodes, the trope must touch the six quadric tangent cones along generators which are tangents to the singular conic.”

5. (archaic)Mathematical senses.
6. Musical senses.

   “Is not the trope of muſic, to avoid or ſlide from the cloſe or cadence, common with the trope of rhetoric, of deceiving expectation? Is not the delight of the quavering upon a ſtop in muſic, the ſame with the playing of light upon the water?”

   “If the antiphon comes to an end with the “Praeparatio” trope, a musical difficulty is presented by the trope’s cadence. Although the antiphon is in the E-plagal mode and the first three trope elements cadence on E, this trope cadences on G, a rare cadence tone in this mode.”

7. Musical senses.
8. (Judaism)Musical senses.

   “The trope does not appear on the handwritten Torah scroll, but the assignment of notes for each word was fixed long ago and is accepted by Jewish communities around the world; the trope now appears in nearly every Jewish printed Bible. […] The symbols that signify the trope for the Hebrew text were introduced at the end of the 10th century of the Common Era.”

9. (Greek)Philosophical senses.
10. Philosophical senses.

verb

1. (transitive)To use, or embellish something with, a trope.

   “The motive for troping the introit was twofold. Firstly there was the desire to add colour, mystical fervour, to the restrained, matter-of-fact Roman rite. Besides this psychological reason there was a practical one. The introit was sung by the choir while the celebrants proceeded towards the altar to officiate at mass. This part of the ritual lent itself very readily to embellishment and expansion.”

   “The specific outcome of that 'story-telling' largely derives from how managers 'figure' their world – how they trope or 'figuratively turn' meanings. So, management decision(s) making is about figurative synthesis – troping literal meaning – as much as it might be analysis.”

2. (transitive)Senses relating chiefly to art or literature.

   “"So clomb this first grand Thief into God's Fold" (4.192), [John] Milton writes, thus troping Satan's transgression as neither deception, seduction, nor disobedience, though he presents it in those terms elsewhere, but rather as robbery.”

   “It suggests that the "masculine" (or exaggeratedly masculine) style of Death in the Afternoon [by Ernest Hemingway] is not a formal or immanent attribute of the text but must be "engendered" through acts of interpretation. And it suggests that what was at stake in this "engendering" was nothing less than the preservation of powerful forms of authentic masculinity in the face of a work that, puzzlingly, seemed to trope the very notions of masculinity and modernism.”

3. (transitive)Senses relating chiefly to art or literature.

   “I troped the World Wide Web as an especially dangerous research venue. "Don't pick up anything unless you know where it has been," I said.”

4. (transitive)Senses relating chiefly to art or literature.
5. (intransitive)To think or write in terms of tropes.

   “By acting in loco parentis, the written word performs its own usurpations of generating authority and generated meanings. Therefore, after the brothers demolish the authority of the word as written, they ar able to substitute alternative authorities: the word as spoken, the word as added, the word as troped, the word as altered, the word as hidden.”