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Bromide in literary usage means a phrase, cliché, or platitude that is trite or unoriginal. It can be intended to soothe or placate; it can suggest insincerity or a lack of originality in the speaker. [1] [2] Bromide can also mean a commonplace or tiresome person, a bore (a person who speaks in bromides).
A platitude is a statement that is seen as trite, meaningless, or prosaic, aimed at quelling social, emotional, or cognitive unease. [1] The statement may be true, but its meaning has been lost due to its excessive use as a thought-terminating cliché.
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
A cliché (UK: / ˈ k l iː ʃ eɪ / or US: / k l iː ˈ ʃ eɪ /; French:) is a saying, idea, or element of an artistic work that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning, novelty, or figurative or artistic power, even to the point of now being bland or uninteresting. [1]
Deus ex machina in Euripides' Medea, performed in 2009 in Syracuse, Italy; the sun god sends a golden chariot to rescue Medea.. Deus ex machina (/ ˌ d eɪ ə s ɛ k s ˈ m æ k ɪ n ə, ˈ m ɑː k-/ DAY-əs ex-MA(H)K-in-ə, [1] Latin: [ˈdɛ.ʊs ɛks ˈmaːkʰɪnaː]; plural: dei ex machina; 'God from the machine') [2] [3] is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is ...
A gloss is a brief notation, especially a marginal or interlinear one, of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text or in the reader's language if that is different. A collection of glosses is a glossary.
A truism is a claim that is so obvious or self-evident as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device, and is the opposite of a falsism. [ 1 ] In philosophy , a sentence which asserts incomplete truth conditions for a proposition may be regarded as a truism. [ 2 ]
In modern times [15] "sentimental" is a pejorative term that has been casually applied to works of art and literature that exceed the viewer or reader's sense of decorum—the extent of permissible emotion—and standards of taste: "excessiveness" is the criterion; [16] "Meretricious" and "contrived" sham pathos are the hallmark of sentimentality, where the morality that underlies the work is ...