Other than the ridiculousness of citing the Washinton Times on any subject, William Safire’s overview of the Key Vocab1 word, synecdoche is amusing.
They must have forgotten my column of only 16 years ago, which explained that metonymy, pronounced muh-TAHN-uh mee, identifies a person or thing by something closely associated with it — like “the brass” for high military officers, “the crown” for royalty and “the suits” for executives, usually male, and other stiffs in traditional business garb. “Metonymy is not to be confused with synecdoche,” I wrote in a display of trope-a-dope, “which is pronounced correctly only in Schenectady and uses the part to refer to the whole” like “wheels” for automobiles and “head” for cattle.
Noone is a somebody who correctly notes the re-emergence of the synecdoche (sih-NECK-doe-key) in the punning title of a new movie directed by the Oscar-winning surrealist screenwriter Charlie Kaufman: “Synecdoche, New York.” Though panned in The Washington Times as “art-house pomposity,” Kaufman’s new work — whose hero is described as a narcissist haunted by the thought of death — is hailed as one of the best films of the decade by Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post. That reviewer notes that “my death is your death is her death is our death — possibly accounting for the title, which isn’t just a phonetic play on Schenectady but a speech form in which a part of something can stand for the whole.” Headline of his review: “Synecdoche: A Part of Life That Makes Us Whole.”
Other headline writers are beginning to catch synecdochal fever. A recent article in The New York Times, datelined Rutshuru in eastern Congo, reported on “white-collar rebels” known as guerrilla warriors who are now trying as civilians to administer the territory they control. The rhyming headline, bordering on today’s figure of speech: “Rebels Used to Boots, Not Suits, Seek to Govern Congo.”
We really should use synecdoches more frequently on these pages.
Oh, and Safire’s article from April 26, 1992, begins:
Wearing his usual Western attire — a plaid shirt, jeans and a quilted down waistcoat — a former rodeo rider named Cy Baumgartner paid a visit to the St. Louis Art Museum and made an interesting discovery: the horseman in “The Bronco Buster,” a bronze by Frederic Remington, was wearing his spurs upside down.
When the real broncobuster (now one word, on the analogy of gangbuster ) pointed out this gaffe to the curator, his embarrassing revelation was received with a disdain bordering on condescension. Mr. Baumgartner, who now drives an 18-wheel truck but retains his interest in the Wild West, cheerfully waved off the frigid attitude of the museum official with “I’ve been lied to by suits all my life.”
This episode was recounted to me by Eliot Porter of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch with the suggestion that I explore “the metonymical use of suit .” He enclosed an early citation in print of a 1984 A.P. Laserphoto (formerly wirephoto) of a bunch of executives marching with briefcases, beneath the title ” Suits in Step.”
First, he is right about metonymy, pronounced muh-TAHN-uh-mee, which is the figure of speech that identifies a person or thing by referring to something closely associated with it. Older examples include the brass for high military officers and the crown for the only royalty not headed for the divorce courts.
Metonymy is not to be confused with synecdoche, which is pronounced correctly only in Schenectady and uses the part to refer to the whole. (“I’m using the wheels , Pops, to go get a new tube ” means your high-definition son is borrowing the car to obtain a new television set.) A suit is associated with, but is not part of, a person, and suit as the figure of speech is therefore metonymic.
- from Mrs. Hettenhausen’s 10th grade Advanced Placement English class, of course [↩]