Information about Humour
Humour or humor (see spelling differences) is the ability or quality of people, objects, or situations to evoke feelings of amusement in other people. The term encompasses a form of entertainment or human communication which evokes such feelings, or which makes people laugh or feel happy.
The origin of the term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which stated that a mix of fluids known as humours (Greek: χυμός, chymos, literally: juice or sap, metaphorically: flavour) controlled human health and emotion.
A sense of humour is the ability to experience humour, a quality which all people share, although the extent to which an individual will personally find something humorous depends on a host of absolute and relative variables, including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, and . For example, young children (of any background) may possibly favour slapstick, such as Punch and Judy puppet shows or cartoons e.g. Tom and Jerry. Satire may rely more on understanding the target of the humour, and thus tends to appeal to more mature audiences. Non-satirical humour can be specifically termed "recreational drollery".[1][2]
The term "humour" as formerly applied in comedy, referred to the interpretation of the sublime and the ridiculous. In this context, humour is often a subjective experience as it depends on a special mood or perspective from its audience to be effective. Arthur Schopenhauer lamented the misuse of the term (the German loanword from English) to mean any type of comedy.
Language is an approximation of thoughts through symbolic manipulation, and the gap between the expectations inherent in those symbols and the breaking of those expectations leads to emotions such as laughter.. Irony is explicitly this form of comedy, whereas slapstick takes more passive social norms relating to physicality and plays with them. In other words, comedy is a sign of a 'bug' in the symbolic make-up of language, as well as a self-correcting mechanism for such bugs. Once the problem in meaning has been described through a joke, people immediately begin correcting their impressions of the symbols that have been mocked. This is one explanation why jokes are often funny only when told the first time.
Another explanation is that humour frequently contains an unexpected, often sudden, shift in perspective. Nearly anything can be the object of this perspective twist. This, however, does not explain why people being humiliated and verbally abused, without it being unexpected or a shift in perspective, is considered funny - ref. "The Office".
Another explanation is that the essence of humour lies in two ingredients; the relevance factor and the surprise factor. First, something familiar (or relevant) to the audience is presented. (However, the relevant situation may be so familiar to the audience that it doesn't always have to be presented, as occurs in absurd humour, for example). From there, they may think they know the natural follow-through thoughts or conclusion. The next principal ingredient is the presentation of something different from the audience's expectations, or else the natural result of interpreting the original situation in a different, less common way (see or surprise factor). For example:
The Simpsons is noted for using this technique many times to evoke humour. Former show runner David Mirkin often refers to it as the “screw-you-audience” joke. A prime example is in the episode "And Maggie Makes Three", wherein Patty and Selma are about to expose the secret of Marge's pregnancy:
Selma: (Looking at the very beginning of the phonebook) "Hi Mr. Aaronson, I'd like to inform you that Marge Simpson is pregnant."
Selma: (Looking exhausted at the very end of the phonebook) "Just thought you'd like to know, Mr. Zackowski. There! Aaronson and Zackowski are the town's biggest gossips. Within an hour, everyone will know.''
Both explanations can be put under the general heading of "failed expectations". In language, or a situation with a relevance factor, or even a sublime setting, an audience has a certain expectation. If these expectations fail in a way that has some credulity, humour results. It has been postulated that the laughter/feel good element of humour is a biological function that helps one deal with the new, expanded point of view: a lawyer thinks differently than a priest or rabbi (below), a banana peel on the floor could be dangerous. This is why some link of credulity is important rather than any random line being a punchline.
For this reason, many jokes work in threes. For instance, a class of jokes exists beginning with the formulaic line "A priest, a rabbi, and a lawyer are sitting in a bar..." (or close variations on this). Typically, the priest will make a remark, the rabbi will continue in the same vein, and then the lawyer will make a third point that forms a sharp break from the established pattern, but nonetheless forms a logical (or at least stereotypical) response. Example of a variation:
Knowing a punch line in advance, or some situation which would spoil the delivery of the punchline, can destroy the surprise factor, and in turn destroy the entertainment value or amusement the joke may have otherwise provided. Conversely, a person previously holding the same unexpected conclusions or secret perspectives as a comedian could derive amusement from hearing those same thoughts expressed and elaborated. That there is commonality, unity of thought, and an ability to openly analyse and express these (where secrecy and inhibited exploration was previously thought necessary) can be both the relevance and the surprise factors in these situations. This phenomenon explains much of the success of comedians who deal with same-gender and same-culture audiences on gender conflicts and cultural topics, respectively.
Notable studies of humour have come from the pens of Aristotle in The Poetics (Part V) and of Schopenhauer.
There also exist linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of humour, irony, parody and pretence. Prominent theoreticians in this field include Raymond Gibbs, Herbert Clark, Michael Billig, Willibald Ruch, Victor Raskin, Eliot Oring, and Salvatore Attardo. Although many writers have emphasised the positive or cathartic effects of humour some, notably Billig, have emphasised the potential of humour for cruelty and its involvement with social control and regulation.
A number of science fiction writers have explored the theory of humour. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein proposes that humour comes from pain, and that laughter is a mechanism to keep us from crying. Isaac Asimov, on the other hand, proposes (in his first jokebook, Treasury of Humor) that the essence of humour is anticlimax: an abrupt change in point of view, in which trivial matters are suddenly elevated in importance above those that would normally be far more important.
Approaches to a general theory of humour have generally referred to analogy or some kind of analogical process of mapping structure from one domain of experience onto another. A notable example of this approach was Arthur Koestler, who identified humour as one of three areas of human creativity (science and art being the other two) that use structure mapping (then termed "bisociation" by Koestler) to create novel meanings[3]. He argues that humour results when two different frames of reference are set up and a collision is engineered between them.
Tony Veale, who is taking a more formalised computational approach than Koestler did, has written on the role of metaphor and metonymy in humour[4][5][6], using inspiration from Koestler as well as from Dedre Gentner´s theory of structure-mapping, George Lakoff´s and Mark Johnson´s theory of conceptual metaphor and Mark Turner´s and Gilles Fauconnier´s theory of conceptual blending.
Humour is also sometimes described as an ingredient in spiritual life. Humour is also the act of being funny. Some synonyms of funny or humour are hilarious, knee-slapping, spiritual, wise-minded, outgoing, and amusing. Some Masters have added it to their teachings in various forms. A famous figure in spiritual humour is the laughing Buddha, who would answer all questions with a laugh.
A sense of humour is the ability to experience humour, a quality which all people share, although the extent to which an individual will personally find something humorous depends on a host of absolute and relative variables, including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, and . For example, young children (of any background) may possibly favour slapstick, such as Punch and Judy puppet shows or cartoons e.g. Tom and Jerry. Satire may rely more on understanding the target of the humour, and thus tends to appeal to more mature audiences. Non-satirical humour can be specifically termed "recreational drollery".[1][2]
Techniques for composing humour
Humour is a branch of rhetoric, there are hundreds of tropes that can be used to make jokes.Verbal
- Figure of speech
- Humorous triple and paraprosdokian
- Enthymeme
- Syllepsis (zeugma)
- Hyperbole
- Understatement
- Bathos, widely used to describe the technique of ending a list of profound items with an extremely trivial one
- Inherently funny words with sounds that make them amusing in the language of delivery
- Irony, where a statement or situation implies both a superficial and a concealed meaning which are at odds with each other.
- Joke
- Adages, often in the form of paradox "laws" of nature, such as Murphy's law or lemon law
- Stereotyping, such as blonde jokes, lawyer jokes, racial jokes, viola jokes.
- Sick Jokes, arousing humour through grotesque, violent or exceptionally cruel scenarios. Soldiers in the field of battle often use 'trench humour' to keep morale up in appalling circumstances.
- Riddle
- Word play
- Oxymoron
- Pun
Non-verbal
- Bathos
- Exaggerated or unexpected gestures and movements
- Character driven, deriving humour from the way characters act in specific situations, without punchlines. Exemplified by The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
- Clash of context humour, such "fish out of water"
- Comic sounds
- Deliberate ambiguity and confusion with reality, often performed by Andy Kaufman
- Unintentional humour, that is, making people laugh without intending to (as with Ed Wood's ''Plan 9 From Outer Space)
- Sight gags
Understanding humour
Some claim that humour cannot or should not be explained. Author E. B. White once said that "Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." However, attempts to do just that have been made.The term "humour" as formerly applied in comedy, referred to the interpretation of the sublime and the ridiculous. In this context, humour is often a subjective experience as it depends on a special mood or perspective from its audience to be effective. Arthur Schopenhauer lamented the misuse of the term (the German loanword from English) to mean any type of comedy.
Language is an approximation of thoughts through symbolic manipulation, and the gap between the expectations inherent in those symbols and the breaking of those expectations leads to emotions such as laughter.. Irony is explicitly this form of comedy, whereas slapstick takes more passive social norms relating to physicality and plays with them. In other words, comedy is a sign of a 'bug' in the symbolic make-up of language, as well as a self-correcting mechanism for such bugs. Once the problem in meaning has been described through a joke, people immediately begin correcting their impressions of the symbols that have been mocked. This is one explanation why jokes are often funny only when told the first time.
Another explanation is that humour frequently contains an unexpected, often sudden, shift in perspective. Nearly anything can be the object of this perspective twist. This, however, does not explain why people being humiliated and verbally abused, without it being unexpected or a shift in perspective, is considered funny - ref. "The Office".
Another explanation is that the essence of humour lies in two ingredients; the relevance factor and the surprise factor. First, something familiar (or relevant) to the audience is presented. (However, the relevant situation may be so familiar to the audience that it doesn't always have to be presented, as occurs in absurd humour, for example). From there, they may think they know the natural follow-through thoughts or conclusion. The next principal ingredient is the presentation of something different from the audience's expectations, or else the natural result of interpreting the original situation in a different, less common way (see or surprise factor). For example:
| A man speaks to his doctor after an operation. He says, "Doc, now that the surgery is done, will I be able to play the piano?" The doctor replies, "Of course!" The man says, "Good, because I couldn't before!" |
Selma: (Looking at the very beginning of the phonebook) "Hi Mr. Aaronson, I'd like to inform you that Marge Simpson is pregnant."
Selma: (Looking exhausted at the very end of the phonebook) "Just thought you'd like to know, Mr. Zackowski. There! Aaronson and Zackowski are the town's biggest gossips. Within an hour, everyone will know.''
Both explanations can be put under the general heading of "failed expectations". In language, or a situation with a relevance factor, or even a sublime setting, an audience has a certain expectation. If these expectations fail in a way that has some credulity, humour results. It has been postulated that the laughter/feel good element of humour is a biological function that helps one deal with the new, expanded point of view: a lawyer thinks differently than a priest or rabbi (below), a banana peel on the floor could be dangerous. This is why some link of credulity is important rather than any random line being a punchline.
For this reason, many jokes work in threes. For instance, a class of jokes exists beginning with the formulaic line "A priest, a rabbi, and a lawyer are sitting in a bar..." (or close variations on this). Typically, the priest will make a remark, the rabbi will continue in the same vein, and then the lawyer will make a third point that forms a sharp break from the established pattern, but nonetheless forms a logical (or at least stereotypical) response. Example of a variation:
| ''A gardener, an architect, and a lawyer are discussing which of their vocations is the most ancient. The gardener comments, "My vocation goes back to the Garden of Eden, when God told Adam to tend the garden." The architect comments, "My vocation goes back to the creation, when God created the world itself from primordial chaos." They both look curiously at the lawyer, who asks, "And who do you think created the primordial chaos?" |
Knowing a punch line in advance, or some situation which would spoil the delivery of the punchline, can destroy the surprise factor, and in turn destroy the entertainment value or amusement the joke may have otherwise provided. Conversely, a person previously holding the same unexpected conclusions or secret perspectives as a comedian could derive amusement from hearing those same thoughts expressed and elaborated. That there is commonality, unity of thought, and an ability to openly analyse and express these (where secrecy and inhibited exploration was previously thought necessary) can be both the relevance and the surprise factors in these situations. This phenomenon explains much of the success of comedians who deal with same-gender and same-culture audiences on gender conflicts and cultural topics, respectively.
Notable studies of humour have come from the pens of Aristotle in The Poetics (Part V) and of Schopenhauer.
There also exist linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of humour, irony, parody and pretence. Prominent theoreticians in this field include Raymond Gibbs, Herbert Clark, Michael Billig, Willibald Ruch, Victor Raskin, Eliot Oring, and Salvatore Attardo. Although many writers have emphasised the positive or cathartic effects of humour some, notably Billig, have emphasised the potential of humour for cruelty and its involvement with social control and regulation.
A number of science fiction writers have explored the theory of humour. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein proposes that humour comes from pain, and that laughter is a mechanism to keep us from crying. Isaac Asimov, on the other hand, proposes (in his first jokebook, Treasury of Humor) that the essence of humour is anticlimax: an abrupt change in point of view, in which trivial matters are suddenly elevated in importance above those that would normally be far more important.
Approaches to a general theory of humour have generally referred to analogy or some kind of analogical process of mapping structure from one domain of experience onto another. A notable example of this approach was Arthur Koestler, who identified humour as one of three areas of human creativity (science and art being the other two) that use structure mapping (then termed "bisociation" by Koestler) to create novel meanings[3]. He argues that humour results when two different frames of reference are set up and a collision is engineered between them.
Tony Veale, who is taking a more formalised computational approach than Koestler did, has written on the role of metaphor and metonymy in humour[4][5][6], using inspiration from Koestler as well as from Dedre Gentner´s theory of structure-mapping, George Lakoff´s and Mark Johnson´s theory of conceptual metaphor and Mark Turner´s and Gilles Fauconnier´s theory of conceptual blending.
Evolution of humour
As any form of art, humour techniques evolve through time. Perception of humour varies greatly among social demographics and indeed from person to person. Throughout history comedy has been used as a form of entertainment all over the world, whether in the courts of the kings or the villages of the far east. Both a social etiquette and a certain intelligence can be displayed through forms of wit and sarcasm.18th-century German author Georg Lichtenberg said that "the more you know humour, the more you become demanding in fineness."Evolution and humor
Sight gags and language-based humour activate the two regions in the human brain known to have von Economo neurons, a specialization in neuron form that has evolved in the last 15 million years. This suggests that humour may have coevolved with the ability of great apes and humans to navigate through a shifting and complex social space.[7]Humour formulae
Root components:- some surprise/misdirection, contradiction, ambiguity or paradox.
- appealing to feelings or to emotions.
- similar to reality, but not real
- By being in an unusual place
- By behaving in an unusual way
- By being the wrong size
Humour is also sometimes described as an ingredient in spiritual life. Humour is also the act of being funny. Some synonyms of funny or humour are hilarious, knee-slapping, spiritual, wise-minded, outgoing, and amusing. Some Masters have added it to their teachings in various forms. A famous figure in spiritual humour is the laughing Buddha, who would answer all questions with a laugh.
See also
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References
1. ^ Seth Benedict Graham A CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE RUSSO-SOVIET ANEKDOT 2003 p.13
2. ^ Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World [1941, 1965]. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press p.12
3. ^ Koestler, Arthur (1964): "The Act of Creation".
4. ^ Veale, Tony (2003): "Metaphor and Metonymy: The Cognitive Trump-Cards of Linguistic Humor"[1]
5. ^ Veale, Tony (2006): "The Cognitive Mechanisms of Adversarial Humor"[2]
6. ^ Veale, Tony (2004): "Incongruity in Humour: Root Cause of Epiphenomonon?"[3]
7. ^ Watson KK, Matthews BJ, Allman JM (2007). "Brain activation during sight gags and language-dependent humor". Cereb Cortex 17 (2): 314–24. DOI:10.1093/cercor/bhj149. PMID 16514105.
8. ^ Rowan Atkinson/David Hinton, Funny Business (tv series), Episode 1 - aired 22 November 1992, UK, Tiger Television Productions
2. ^ Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World [1941, 1965]. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press p.12
3. ^ Koestler, Arthur (1964): "The Act of Creation".
4. ^ Veale, Tony (2003): "Metaphor and Metonymy: The Cognitive Trump-Cards of Linguistic Humor"[1]
5. ^ Veale, Tony (2006): "The Cognitive Mechanisms of Adversarial Humor"[2]
6. ^ Veale, Tony (2004): "Incongruity in Humour: Root Cause of Epiphenomonon?"[3]
7. ^ Watson KK, Matthews BJ, Allman JM (2007). "Brain activation during sight gags and language-dependent humor". Cereb Cortex 17 (2): 314–24. DOI:10.1093/cercor/bhj149. PMID 16514105.
8. ^ Rowan Atkinson/David Hinton, Funny Business (tv series), Episode 1 - aired 22 November 1992, UK, Tiger Television Productions
Further reading
-
id="CITEREFBasu">Basu, S (December 1999), "Dialogic ethics and the virtue of humor", Journal of Political Philosophy (Blackwell Publishing Ltd) Vol. 7 (No. 4): 378-403, DOI:10.1111/1467-9760.00082, <[4] (retrieved on 2007-07-06) (Abstract)
- Billig, M. (2005). Laughter and ridicule: Towards a social critique of humour. London: Sage. ISBN: 1412911435
- Bricker, Victoria Reifler (Winter, 1980) The Function of Humor in Zinacantan Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 411-418
-
id="CITEREFBuijzenValkenburg2004">Buijzen, Moniek & Patti M. Valkenburg (2004), "Developing a Typology of Humor in Audiovisual Media", Media Psychology Vol. 6 (No. 2): 147-167, DOI:10.1207/s1532785xmep0602_2, <[5](Abstract)
- Carrell, Amy (2000), Historical views of humour, University of Central Oklahoma. Retrieved on 2007-07-06.
-
id="CITEREFGarcía-BarriocanalSiciliaPalomar2005">García-Barriocanal, Elena; Miguel-Angel Sicilia & David Palomar (2005), A Graphical Humor Ontology for Contemporary Cultural Heritage Access, Ctra. Barcelona, km.33.6, 28871 Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), Spain,: University of Alcalá, <[6] (retrieved on 2007-07-06)
- Goldstein, Jeffrey H., et al. (1976) "Humour, Laughter, and Comedy: A Bibliography of Empirical and Nonempirical Analyses in the English Language." It's a Funny Thing, Humour. Ed. Antony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot. Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1976. 469-504.
- Holland, Norman. (1982) "Bibliography of Theories of Humor." Laughing; A Psychology of Humor. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 209-223.
- Luttazzi, Daniele (2004) Introduction to his Italian translation of Woody Allen's trilogy Side Effects, Without Feathers and Getting Even (Bompiani, 2004, ISBN 88-452-3304-9 (57-65).
- Martin, Rod A. (2007). The Psychology Of Humour: An Integrative Approach. London, UK: Elsevier Academic Press. ISBN 13: 978-0-12-372564-6
- McGhee, Paul E. (1984) "Current American Psychological Research on Humor." Jahrbuche fur Internationale Germanistik 16.2: 37-57.
- Mintz, Lawrence E., ed. (1988) Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1988. ISBN: 0313245517; OCLC: 16085479.
- Mobbs, D., Greicius, M.D.; Abdel-Azim, E., Menon, V. & Reiss, A. L. (2003) "Humor modulates the mesolimbic reward centers". Neuron, 40, 1041-1048.
- Nilsen, Don L. F. (1992) "Satire in American Literature." Humor in American Literature: A Selected Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1992. 543-48.
- Pogel, Nancy, and Paul P. Somers Jr. (1988) "Literary Humor." Humor in America: A Research Guide to Genres and Topics. Ed. Lawrence E. Mintz. London: Greenwood, 1988. 1-34.
- Roth, G., Yap, R, & Short, D. (2006). "Examining humour in HRD from theoretical and practical perspectives". Human Resource Development International, 9(1), 121-127.
- Smuts, Aaron. "Humor". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
-
id="CITEREFWogan">Wogan, Peter (Spring 2006), "Laughing At First Contact", Visual Anthropology Review Vol. 22 (No. 1): 14-34, online December 12, 2006, DOI:10.1525/var.2006.22.1.14, <[7] (retrieved on 2007-07-06) (Abstract)
External links
- Laughing At First Contact at the Open Directory Project
- International Society for Humor Studies
- No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality and Ethnicity International Humanities Institute, Dartmouth College
funny pictures
American and British English spelling differences are one aspect of American and British English differences.
In the early 18th century, English spelling was not standardised. Different standards became noticeable after the publishing of influential dictionaries.
..... Read more.Quality in everyday life and business, engineering and manufacturing has a pragmatic interpretation as the non-inferiority, superiority or usefulness of something. This is the most common interpretation of the term.
..... Read more.Amusement is the state of experiencing humorous and usually entertaining events or situations, and is associated with enjoyment, happiness, laughter and pleasure. Amusement may also be experienced through the recollection of events which have given rise to amusement in the
..... Read more.Entertainment is an event, performance, or activity designed to give pleasure or relaxation to an audience (although, for example, in the case of a computer game the "audience" may be only one person).
..... Read more.Communication is a process that allows organisms to exchange information by several methods. Communication requires that all parties understand a common language that is exchanged with each other.
..... Read more.original research or unverifiable claims.
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..... Read more.42 (1), 43-55. doi: 10.1111/1468-5906.t01-1-00160
18. ^ Moreira-Almeida Alexander, Lotufo Neto Francisco, Koenig Harold G. "Religiousness and mental health: a review" . Rev. Bras. Psiquiatr. [serial on the Internet]. 2006 September, cited 2007 June 21, 2007 ; 28(3): 242-250.
..... Read more.Humorism, or humoralism, was a theory of the makeup and workings of the human body adopted by ancient Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers. From Hippocrates onward, the humor theory was the most commonly-held view of the human body among European physicians until the
..... Read more.The term ancient Greece refers to the periods of Greek history in Classical Antiquity, lasting ca. 750 BC[1] (the archaic period) to 146 BC (the Roman conquest). It is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the foundation of Western Civilization.
..... Read more.Greek
Writing system: Greek alphabet
Official status
Official language of: Greece
Cyprus
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recognised as minority language in parts of:
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Regulated by:
..... Read more.JUICE is a widely used non-commercial software package for editing and analysing phytosociological data.
It was developed at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic in 1998, and is fully described in English manual.
..... Read more.The abbreviation, acronym, or initialism SAP may stand for:- Ramón Villeda Morales International Airport, located in San Pedro Sula, Honduras (IATA code is SAP)
- Serum Amyloid P Component, the identical serum form of Amyloid P component (AP)
..... Read more.Flavor or flavour (see spelling differences) is the sensory impression of a food or other substance, and is determined mainly by the chemical senses of taste and smell.
..... Read more.variable (IPA pronunciation: [ˈvæɹiəbl]) (sometimes called a pronumeral) is a symbolic representation denoting a quantity or expression.
..... Read more.In geography, location is a position or point in physical space that something occupies on Earths' surface. A real location can often be designated using a specific pairing of latitude and longitude, a Cartesian coordinate grid (e.g.
..... Read more.Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning "to cultivate,") generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significant importance.
..... Read more.Education encompasses teaching and learning specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, positive judgment and well-developed wisdom.
..... Read more.Slapstick is a type of comedy involving exaggerated physical violence or activities (e.g., a character being hit in the face with a frying pan or running full speed into a wall).
..... Read more.Punch and Judy is a popular puppet show featuring Punch and his wife Judy. The performance consists of a sequence of short scenes, each depicting an interaction between two characters, most typically the anarchic Punch and one other character.
..... Read more.Satire (from Latin satura, not from the Greek mythological figure satyr[1]) is a literary genre, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision,
..... Read more.
..... Read more.Trope may refer to:- Trope (linguistics), a rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words
- Trope (literature), a story-telling shorthand.
- Trope (philosophy)
- Trope (music)
..... Read more.A figure of speech, sometimes termed a rhetoric, or elocution, is a word or phrase that departs from straightforward, literal language. Figures of speech are often used and crafted for emphasis, freshness of expression, or clarity. However, clarity may also suffer from their use.
..... Read more.A paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax.
..... Read more.An enthymeme is an informally stated syllogism (a three-part deductive argument) with an unstated assumption that must be true for the premises to lead to the conclusion. In an enthymeme, part of the argument is missing because it is assumed.
..... Read more.Zeugma (from the Greek word "ζεύγμα", meaning "yoke") is a figure of speech describing the joining of two or more parts of a sentence with a single common verb or noun.
..... Read more.Zeugma (from the Greek word "ζεύγμα", meaning "yoke") is a figure of speech describing the joining of two or more parts of a sentence with a single common verb or noun.
..... Read more.This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the for details.
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..... Read more.Understatement is a form of speech in which a lesser expression is used than what would be expected. This is not to be confused with euphemism, where a polite phrase is used in place of a harsher or more offensive expression.
..... Read more.For the Aarni album, see .Bathos is Greek for depth. As used in English it originally referred to a particular type of bad poetry, but it is now used more broadly to cover any ridiculous artwork or performance.
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