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  1. topos love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. A traditional theme or motif; a literary convention.

Wiktionary

  1. n. A literary theme or motif; a rhetorical convention or formula.
  2. n. mathematics A certain mathematical structure found in category theory.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. a traditional theme or motif or literary convention

Etymologies

  1. From Ancient Greek τόπος (topos, "place"). Compare topic. (Wiktionary)
  2. Greek, short for (koinos) topos, (common)place. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “Aristotle says: “we must find the location (topos) from which to attack,” where the word ˜topos™ is obviously used to mean a starting point for attacking the theses of the opponents.”

    Aristotle's Rhetoric

  • “The notion of topos is due for a revival, especially if we are to consider seriously the recuperation of sentimental poetry and the many women poets who do not invest in the masculinised rhetorics of anti-rhetoric proffered in the Lyrical Ballads model of Romantic-period literary history.”

    _Queen Mab_ as Topological Repertoire

  • “In addition, help was offered by a search-and-rescue group called "topos" -- (moles) -- organized by youths who dug through collapsed buildings after Mexico City's 1985 earthquake.”

    Maggie Van Ostrand: What You Don't Know About Mexico

  • “Very roughly, a topos is a category possessing a logical structure sufficiently rich to develop most of”

    Category Theory

  • “The inscription found on a portico base was identified as a topos inscription by Professor Dennis Feissel in Paris -- "pro teketai [iu] lianou," or "the place reserved for [Ju] lian.”

    Interactive Dig Sagalassos - N-S Colonnaded Street Report 4

  • “Now a topos is a motif which takes the form of a literary commonplace or rhetorical set-piece: e.g., the comparison between nature and a book or between the world and the theater.”

    MOTIF

  • “7 This topos has been a subject of well known investigations from Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton 1967), 319-326, to Jacques Derrida, Of”

    Plotnitsky, Notes

  • “When English lawyer Sir Thomas More--a devout Roman Catholic--coined the word "utopia" to describe his imaginary island nation in the early 16th century, it was a play on the Greek eu-topos, meaning "good place" and ou-topos, meaning "no place".”

    Forbes: Forbes Faces Of The Week: Feb. 27-Mar. 3, 2006Faces Of The Week: Feb. 27-Mar. 3, 2006

  • “These are "topos" ( "place") inscriptions followed by a name in the possessive case, which gave official authorization to a particular salesman to use this spot.”

    Interactive Dig Sagalassos - Upper Agora Report 1

  • “So it appears that Percy Shelley developed an oppositional poetics which pitted one kind of topos against another.”

    _Queen Mab_ as Topological Repertoire

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‘topos’ has been looked up 2353 times, loved by 2 people, added to 16 lists, and has a Scrabble score of 7.