A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1190 entries
topos
A topos is a recurring theme, image, or formula in writing and speech: the shepherd’s idyll, the world turned upside down, the modesty of the author, the golden age that has just been lost. It is a place in the argument rather than a place on the ground, a spot a writer can go to and find material already there. The plural is topoi. That said, I’d like to nominate it as the physical topo- and geographic expression of place. Where terroir relates to food and drink, topos would describe the vibe of a place, people, weather, terrain, and all.
Etymology
The word is Greek for a place, the same root behind toponym. Classical rhetoric taught that arguments were stored in places in the mind and retrieved from them, which is where the sense comes from, and the Latin translation of the term gives English commonplace, a word that has since collapsed into meaning something unremarkable.
Notes
The spatial metaphor was literal in practice. The classical memory system, the method of loci, worked by placing things to be remembered at points along a remembered walk through a real building, and retrieving them by walking it again. That is a piece of technology that treats memory as terrain, and it is the same instinct behind songline, which is a real route holding a real body of knowledge in order.