trope
/trəʊp
/noun
1A figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression: both clothes and illness became tropes for new attitudes toward the self my sense that philosophy has become barren is a recurrent trope of modern philosophy perhaps it is a mistake to use tropes and parallels in this eminently unpoetic age...
- The scrolls and the codex of the two novels are maps for the reader in linking the tropes, metaphors, and themes of each novel in a non-linear coherence.
- Putting metaphor and other tropes in a rather remote place, he propounded another aspect of figurative language as absolutely essential to the sublime.
- No longer will one or two tropes or metaphors serve to characterize the poetic work done by women.
1.1A significant or recurrent theme; a motif: she uses the Eucharist as a pictorial trope...
- The most disturbing of these tropes is the idea that ‘combat’ is ‘the highest form of manliness’.
- The relative absence of conventional musical tropes doesn't mean, though, that the group approaches compositional matters indifferently.
- All those things are the tropes of a reductive idea about what is woman and female.
Origin
Mid 16th century: via Latin from Greek tropos 'turn, way, trope', from trepein 'to turn'.