Trope-A-Dope
We Can't Cure It, So Let's Laugh At It

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

When you go off to college to be educated, you fall in among a crowd of people who cultivate a mysterious body of unfamiliar beliefs, opinions, and attitudes. You want to be like these people, you hang around them, and soon you're believing and opining and attitudinizing just like them; education seeps into you gradually, and from the outside. Among the the things you unconsciously pick up in this process is a vocabulary that brands you as belonging to a given tribe. And if the tribe you fell amongst is that one devoted to literature, then one of the egregious words in your new vocabulary is the vacuous, meaningless, odious word trope.

Now there are lots of people who write for a living but who don't ever use the word trope, and that's because they are journalists and they have to write for real people and real people stop reading any article the minute they see the word trope.

So you won't see trope in The New York Times, where the editor presumably viciously suppresses any attempt to use the word...save perhaps in the Editorial section where overwritten prose is permitted, or in the Sunday magazine, which no one reads anyway.

This would leave the trope infestation confined to the rank and odorous jungle of literature about literature for the literati, one might assume. But it seems that there's lately not enough room in academia for all who would be safely quarantined there, for the online journals are riddled with miseducated trope-slingers who would feel that they hadn't got their money's worth of education if they had to say "thingie" or "doodad" or "whatchamacallit" instead of their favorite word.

While I do, indeed, stop reading any article at the first trope eruption, I feel that I must redirect my annoyance to laughter, since the parade of trope-zombies seems inexhaustible. Thus, I have decided to construct a Tropicon...

• tropacetic, of the pleasant mental state of blankness induced by reading text riddled with the word trope;
• trope chest, any collection of essays or reviews by more than one trope slinger;
• tropely, of an argument or discussion that exemplifies the tropical attitude;
• tropic, of one who perhaps tropes a bit excessively;
• tropical, of any writing or discussion in which the word trope is liable to occur, is felt to be about to occur, has already occurred, or (shudder) has occurred once already and seems about to recur momentarily;
• tropicana, that is, the trope arcana, the hidden wisdom of the tropitarians;
• tropidacious, one unafraid to speak the word trope in ``mixed'' company, that is, in the hearing of the illiterati;
• the Tropisphere, the exclusive society of those learned in the correct application of tropism;
• tropism, the use of the word trope; the belief that a trope is a concept with meaning; a thought, expression or publication containing a missing part which has been hidden behind the word trope;
• tropist, a trope artist, an expert trope slinger;
• tropitarian, one who thinks every paragraph is made better by inserting the word trope;
• tropize, to elevate a concept into a trope;
• troporrhea, an incurable condition in which the sufferer compulsively, reflexively, and unconsciously emits fulsome streams of verbal effluent heavily larded with usages of trope where actually meaningful words would have been expected;

Abandon all trope, ye who exit here!