Trope

The trope concept, which is used increasingly in the social sciences to conceptualize the dynamics of definitions (and redefinitions) of social situations involved in communicative interaction, is derived from the Greek tropos (a turning), tropë (a turn), or trepein (to turn). It has long been used as a technical term in rhetoric to designate the use of a word or expression in a different sense than that which properly belongs to it in order to give liveliness, emphasis, perspective, coloration, or some other quality to an idea. The figures of speech (metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, and irony) are the four main categories of tropes, although tropes have been multitudinously identified in treatises on rhetoric.