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Health & Fitness

It's a Trope… No Wait, It's a Meme!

Kathleen attempts to understand the difference between two cultural...memes

This weekend PBS begins a new documentary series called “America in Prime Time.”  As the Chronicle’s Dave Wiegand describes it: “By examining the genesis of four distinct character types in TV over the past 60 years, the four-part film tells us as much about the evolution of American culture and values during that time as it does about TV itself.”

It’s just in time to help me understand two terms that I’ve been seeing more often: trope and meme.  I wasn’t quite sure of the difference, so I decided to track down some detail to help me keep them straight in my head.

Per Wikipedia, in linguistics trope is a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of using a word in a way other than its normal form.  The basic trope uses words in nonliteral ways, such as a "cakewalk" (an easy accomplishment). An ironic trope is one in which the meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning, such as describing a bad situation as "good times". One of the most common forms is the synecdoche: a play on words, such as “hired hands” for workers.

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(Note: A trope in musical terminology is somewhat different; my 1961 edition of the Harvard Dictionary of Music defines it as a sequence of notes or words inserted permanently into a pre-existing piece.)

In literature and the world of entertainment, the meaning of trope is specialized, and this is where the PBS series comes in.  According to TVtropes, tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably assume will be familiar to the audience or reader.  It can be a plot trick, a setup, a narrative structure, or a character type.

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For example, when you see someone assigned an unpleasant task after questioning the boss’s judgment, that’s a trope called “punishment detail” within the industry. In a laundry commercial, when you see the little boy’s mud-covered t-shirt, you can be sure it will be followed by the smiling mom who has used the product to wash it clean.

New Yorker cartoons are a great source of this kind of trope.  Certain visual themes show up over and over again with new captions.  There’s the desert island cartoon, the group sitting around a meeting table, the couple in bed, the child speaking to its parents (or vice versa). Each image sets up an expectation even before you read the caption, because you already know the basic setup.

A meme, on the other hand, is "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture" (think “lolcats” and smiling dogs). A meme transmits cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, and they change, or mutate, as do genes.

The word meme, coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, is a shortening of 'mimeme', from Ancient Greek, meaning "something imitated".

Some of the most common are Internet memes -- catchphrases or images that spread rapidly via the Internet. A recent example is the photo of the White House Situation Room during the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.  Photoshoppers immediately began fooling with the iconic image, editing Keanu Reeves, the grumpy flower girl, a velociraptor, and the shocked cat into the photo and posting it on Internet sites.

Other meme examples, courtesy of Smithsonian on line, include: 

  • First World Problems: frustrations and complaints that are only experienced by privileged individuals in wealthy countries. This one often shows up in comments to Internet articles as a way to belittle the author’s trivial inproblems and perspective.
  • Survival of the fittest mutates wildly (“survival of the fattest”; “survival of the sickest”; “survival of the fakest”; “survival of the twittest”).
  • Jumped the shark, meaning to pass a peak of quality or popularity and begin an irreversible decline. The phrase was thought to have been used first in 1985 by a college student named Sean J. Connolly, in reference to an episode of the television series “Happy Days” in which the character Fonzie (Henry Winkler), on water skies, jumps over a shark.

 

So I think I understand the difference now, although I'm pretty sure that jumping the shark could be a trope as well as a meme. 

What's your favorite trope? Or meme?  And if you're thinking of writing a screenplay or just want to read more about this, check out these references:

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