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From: T3B@psuvm.BITNET
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Rhetorical Device Query
Message-ID: <2120T3B@psuvm>
Date: Tue, 20-Aug-85 08:56:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: psuvm.2120T3B
Posted: Tue Aug 20 08:56:42 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 23-Aug-85 20:53:05 EDT
References: <277@mit-athena.UUCP> <3318@dartvax.UUCP> <723@ptsfa.UUCP> <> <181@proper.UUCP> <634@psivax.UUCP> 538@calmasd.UUCP
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>  [original note asks if there is a name for the rhetorical device
>  of using a trite phrase restored to its original meaning]
     
The definitive book on figures of speech is probably still Quintilian's
INSTITUTES OF ORATORY, and I don't remember his discussing this one.
     
But you may really, in your question be talking about language-turns
of at least three sorts:
     
1) Trite, outworn phrases restored to their original meanings.
2) Phrases normally used metaphorically that are invoked literally.
3) Usually ironic catch phrases that are de-ironized.
    Of this last one, for which I'd tentatively propose the name
    REIRONY or DEIRONY, there's a complication.  In the examples you
    cited, there is not a reduction of an original irony to literalism,
    but an *addition* of irony achieved when ironic expectations are
    reversed--itself an irony.
     
Hence, there is a sense in which all three of these usages are ironic,
since they are not an absence of the original metaphor, cliche, or
irony, but an ironic reversal of our expectations about it.
     
Do you know Wayne Booth's RHETORIC OF IRONY?  Might be some theory there
that would help.
     
-- Tom Benson
     
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