Kenneth Burke, a rhetorician(?), talks about four master tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. He does not create a new typology of figures like past rhetoricians (Cicero, Longinus, Puttenham) because he feels that every figure, which could have potentially infinite separate names, spring from these four basic types. There seems to be some kind of correlation, if a distant one, to Giambattista Vico who had postulated that, before early humans had language, there were four major mental figures that were the foundation of the rest of the figures commonly identified. Whereas Vico seems to be doing some kind of anthropology through the study of figures, I think Burke avoids theorizing about language origins the way Vico does.

In any event, broadly speaking Metaphor identifies one thing for another (A=B), Metonymy has one thing that is part of a whole ( B (A)), Synecdoche has one thing result from another (A --> B), and Irony has one thing that does not equal the other (A =/= B).

After talking with the professor about my idea, which has to do with hyperlinking, he suggests that I should get at Burke's purposes for proposing these four tropes. I should tell why these four tropes are something that is useful--the "correspondences in drawing out those tropes and larger issues. Specifically, I should address "perspective, reduction, representation, and dialectics." I should "talk about these four substitutions, which represents different perspectives from which to work.

As for myself, is there anything I can do with 1337 speak? Can I do anything with the forms of certain websites, especially blogs themselves. This might have to be looked into and thought about more. Is there something about RSS feeds, or a general kind of aggregation?