Literary Terms You Might Be Misusing

George Bellows, “Swans in Central Park.” Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In case you were wondering, usage determines meaning. That dictionary that you thought was establishing meaning actually just provides a snapshot of how the language is used at any particular time. That’s why words like “selfie” get added from time to time. If enough people decided to start calling dogs cats, or vice versa, eventually that would become standard. So trying to resist the way that users of language push meaning over time is a little vain and foolish. I’m going to pull back a little anyway.

Protagonist — This term is overused, and there are good reasons not to use it. Most of the time, people use it to mean “main character,” and so that term should be used instead. The primary reason it is usually a mistake to refer to a character as the protagonist is that it implies the presence of an antagonist. The protagonist in a work of literature, usually a tragic play, struggles against the antagonist, who works to frustrate, confuse, and defeat the protagonist. This is an outdated model for understanding literature, and it doesn’t apply well to most contemporary writing, because most contemporary writing doesn’t include an antagonist. The term applies most appropriately to the main character in a Greek tragedy, but even then, its usefulness is limited and/or complicated. Some Greek playwrights (Euripides, Sophocles) seem to have been interested in creating some confusion…