Negative nancy trope11/4/2022 ![]() Or it’s a lazy stand-in for “tortured past” or “deep soulfulness.” Bull hockey. This is an attempt, I think, to show that the protag has a hard job or worse, hates his job. Let me give it a try and then I hope you all will weigh in, please. But here’s the point of all this: As you ponder your plot and characterizations, the hard part is distinguishing between what is a good and useful trope of our genre and what is just tired cliché. We crime dogs honor the formulas of our genre, yet the best of us, like Balanchine, color outside the lines. Yet from that tight formula came love stories as old as Petipa’s romantic “Swan Lake” to the new of George Balanchine’s abstract “Agon.” In ballet, there are only FIVE arm positions and FIVE foot positions. ![]() I think of crime fiction the same way I think of ballet. Now I for one, think “genre” itself is not a dirty word. ![]() At its worst, a trope is a cliché, something overused that shows a lack of original thought. Good literary tropes honor genre traditions. At its best, a trope is a time-honored technique or classic theme. Which is now called “crop dusting.”Īs I noted above, it has two divergent definitions. And then there is the word “fizzle.” We use it today to mean something just sort of peters out, right? In the 1500s, it meant to silently pass gas. “Girl” was just a young lady once, then it became a sort of pejorative, to put women down or even men, as in “You throw like a girl.” But of late, women have (thankfully, I say) reclaimed it as a power badge. English is a gloriously elastic language. It used to be negative, starting out (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) as “filling” then “tending to cause nausea,” then finally “wearisome from excess or repetition.” Now, I guess because “full” sounds good, it has come to be misused as “generous.” The beloved professor received fulsome praise. “What a hellacious storm!” Now, it can mean either good or bad. It began life as college slang in the 1930s, a combo of “hell” and “bodacious” and it was used as a negative. One of my pet peeves is when a perfectly good word gets corrupted by misuse and comes to mean both sides of something, and thus means nothing. I added the red there because that second definition sort of pissed me off. The word trope has also come to be used for describing commonly recurring literary and rhetorical devices, motifs or clichés in creative works. So, to save you the trouble…Ī literary trope is the use of figurative language, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect such as using a figure of speech. NEGATIVE NANCY TROPE MOVIEYet I’ve run across the word at least six times in recent months, usually in book and movie reviews, which forced me to the Google machine to find out what the heck I’ve been missing. But all these decades later, I can safely say that the word “trope” has never taken a front seat in my writer brain. Post-Colonial British Literature class and missed it. Now it’s possible I might have dosed off during my 8 a.m. I was an English literature major way back in college and I now am going on record that not once did I ever encounter the word “trope.” ![]()
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