Downing the whole can: If I literally consumed the aluminum can, I would be headed for surgery instead of a conference room. The can is a metonymy, a container that stands for the thing it contains. People used to say of an alcoholic that he was “hitting the bottle,” meaning drinking copious amounts of alcohol. The bottle is a metonymy. And so is “hitting,” for that matter, in the same sense as slamming a Red Bull. And did you notice that “downing” is a metonymy as well? It takes the consequence of an action—drinking, which makes the liquid go down—and makes it represent the action itself.
Liquid courage: The energy drink gives me courage, but I don’t say that. Instead I say the drink is courage. The result, courage, stands for the thing. That’s a metonymy.
C-suite: The “C” in this typical bit of corporate jargon stands for “chief.” This Valhalla within office buildings, usually occupying one of the highest floors, contains the chief executive officer, the chief operating officer, the chief marketing officer, the chief financial officer, and so on. A veritable ocean of C’s. I say I’m pitching to the C-suite, meaning I’m speaking to the people who dwell there—not the set of rooms and hallways covered with innocuous art. Again, a metonymy. A rhetorician could argue that the “C” is a metonymy as well, but let’s not quibble. (On the other hand, referring to the levels of a building as “floors” qualifies as a synecdoche. We’ll get to that fun trope in a bit.)
Gives me the stink-eye: The receptionist’s eye stands for the whole sour expression. Which looks stinky. Bad detective novelists turn women receptionists’ eyes into “baby blues,” making a color stand for ocular organs. When you take a piece or quality or characteristic, or even something that reminds you of a characteristic (like a stinky expression), you’re firing a multiple round of metonymies.
Slides are thrown up on the screen: If you’re under thirty you may not have held an actual slide: a processed positive photographic film surrounded by a protective cardboard frame. You may have seen one on the AMC series Mad Men. PowerPoint uses digital code to imitate these quaint objects. Because the rectangular fields on the screen look like slides, we call them slides. That makes it a metonymy. And since there’s nothing actual to throw, the phrase “thrown up” puts it in trope-land; metonymy-land, to be specific. The trope makes something like an action stand for an action.
Roomful of suits: A suit worn by a chief executive something-or-other stands for the man or woman. Metonymy takes a container (suit) and turns it into the contents (chief exec).
Face time: I’m spending time not just with faces but with the whole powerful room of suits.
Collecting eyeballs: Yuck. Attracting people to online videos gets turned into a horror film. The eyeballs represent the act of looking: an instrument (eyes) standing for the action (looking). That makes it a metonymy. You could also say that “collecting,” standing for gathering the data on these distracted starers, counts as another metonymy.
There are more metonymies buried within that sad corporate tale. Can you find them? Hint: faces, pumped, dashboard, even the word slide (something one slides into a projector)…
Once you get a handle on the metonymy, you might start seeing the trope’s potential power. In fact, I believe metonymy to be the most black-magicky of all tropes. It colors reality, often literally. For instance, when a person with auburn-colored hair gets the inevitable nickname “Red,” her whole ethos gets a ginger tint. Her name may be Louise or Lourdes or Linda, but the metonymy makes people see red. More than any other trope, metonymies turn your mind. The Greeks understood this. That’s why they named tropes in the first place. Our English version comes from their tropos, meaning “turn.” While figures can form a turn of phrase, tropes give a twist to our senses, showing a different angle to reality.
Useful Figure
ALLITERATION: Repeating the first letter or sound of successive words. While writers tend to misuse it in the vain attempt to be clever, “Louise or Lourdes or Linda” implies that I’m covering the gamut of women’s names. Alliteration makes for a good synecdoche.
Meanings
Strangely, gringo, the word many Latinos use for English-speaking Americans, probably comes from the Spanish word griego, meaning “Greek,” or foreigner. But an old folk tale has gringo coming from a song. During the Spanish-American War, American soldiers sang a popular tune, “Green Grow the Rushes, O.” It’s probably not true but it ought to be.
No trope does this better than the metonymy, for evil as well as good. The trope often gets used to slant our view of whole groups of people. Take the word barbarian. It comes from the Greek barbaros, meaning “foreigner.” In ancient Sanskrit, the language of the Indian subcontinent, the word barbaras means “stammering.” It’s not hard to suss out a metonymic tale from these word-geeky facts: the “civilized” people heard foreigners jabber away and it all sounded like bar bar bar bar…The sound gets used to represent the speakers. That’s a metonymy.
Which reminds me of a kid who, when he heard I was going to Italy, asked if I spoke Pasta. A perfect metonymy. And while I don’t personally speak Pasta, I have a real fondness for the Pastan people. Very few barbarians among them.
Coining metonymies of your own takes practice. You need to extract a characteristic, action, sign, instrument, or material from whatever you want to represent; these criteria aren’t always easy to get your head around. Yet kids often metonymize instinctively, especially when they mess up the language. My friend Gail was teaching third graders synonyms when she asked her class to come up with different names for women. “Wides,” answered one little boy.
Wides?
“That’s what my daddy calls them,” he said.
Gail suddenly realized: broads. The word happens to be one of the more sexist metonymies. The boy had innocently created a metonymy of a metonymy, albeit an unflattering one.
My daughter, Dorothy Jr., had a favorite stuffed animal when she was little. It was white with spots, the kind called an appaloosa. She called it “Apple Juice-a.” It wasn’t just a confusion of sound. The horse and apple juice were two of her favorite things. They shared a characteristic: ecstatic lovability. Kids can’t help but metonymize creatures, coining “bow-wows,” “moo-cows,” and “quacks” (the avian kind, not the medical ones). When Dorothy Jr. was two she saw a runner by the road and dubbed him a “trit-trot,” which was exactly the sound his shoes made on the pavement.
If a kid can make metonymies, so can you. My boardroom story mentioned “suits.” Clothing really does make the man when it comes to metonymies. The Washington press corps likes to call K Street, where many lobbyists and lawyers keep their offices, “Gucci Gulch.” Thanks to metonymy, a whole avenue in our nation’s capital gets named after a shoe. Your own office may be more Birkenstock or Timberland. A group of informally dressed men could be “untucks.” Or does everyone untuck these days?
Smell makes great aromatic metonymies. A group of overly scented men could be the colognes; or, if you want to sound formal, the gentlemen of Cologne. Ditto with sound. A boring person is a snore; the metonymy comes not from the sound he makes but the soporific effect he has on his audience. A self-pitying billionaire is a whine. An angry politician is a snarl.
Containers offer lots of metonymic possibilities. Hence the man cave, a room full of Naugahyde furniture and electronics.
And try opening a can of whup-ass. The expression implies that the opponent is looking for trouble, like opening Pandora’s box. You can shrink-wrap almost anything when you want to connote the same prepackaged, somewhat artificial flavor. A candidate can represent shrink-wrapped family values, or shrink-wrapped fiscal policy. You could say I’m a freezer full of unthawed bad ideas.
Material works like containers. I recently saw a clothing shop sign in Vermont, America’s crunchiest state, that proclaimed, “Flax Is In.” Organic vegan Vermonters could well be flaxes. (The same typ
e used to call the more traditional Vermonters “Emmetts,” which is a rube-sounding name.)
Persuasion Alert
Did you notice that calling Vermont “crunchy” constitutes a metonymy? The stereotypical vegan feasts on twigs and bark and crunchy granola, making loud self-righteous mouth sounds—according to vegan-haters. The sound represents the action of eating, which represents the diet, which represents the person, which unfairly represents the whole state of Vermont! Come to think of it, the state’s very name, Vermont, which derives from the French meaning “green mountain,” is a metonymy. It’s the most pervasive, and invisible, trope.
A bit trickier is the metonymy that comes from an instrument, such as “first violin” or “top gun.” A writer like me isn’t exactly a keyboard, though in the old days I might have been called an ink blot. But a doctor could be a stethoscope. And an unkind pharmacist could definitely be called a pill.
If you find yourself stymied, just spend some time keeping watch for words that don’t make precise logical sense. You’ll probably spot a trope. And more often than not, that trope will be a metonymy.
Synecdoche: Don’t Be Such a Khaleesi
We spent significant time on the metonymy because it’s the hardest trope, yet the most common—and the most powerful. The synecdoche is somewhat easier. This trope, remember, takes an individual and makes it represent a group, or vice versa. If I say the blue whale is endangered, I’m talking about the 25,000 remaining blue whales. One whale represents the whole species.
The synecdoche works in the opposite way as well. America went to the moon refers to a very small group of astronauts. When Washington finally won the 2019 World Series for the first time in its history, every Washingtonian may have felt as if she personally won the game; but in reality “Washington” is just another synecdoche, a set of ballplayers referred to as a city.
Which reminds me of when I was in college and a classmate’s mother offered to arrange a job interview for an internship with the Wall Street Journal. Having never heard of that newspaper, I politely refused her help. Why would an ambitious young man like me want to cover just one street? (It’s a true story, which shows just how clueless an ambitious young man I was.) Wall Street is a synecdoche, a few blocks standing for a financial empire that in fact is geographically dispersed. Wall Street’s counterpart, Main Street, is beloved of politicians. It conjures a picture of small shops, a savings and loan, a strolling policeman who tips his hat at the ladies, hardworking middle-class citizens busily tugging hard at their bootstraps, whatever they are…and how many places look like that? Both streets show how well the trope turns our heads from hard reality.
Synecdoches may seem harmless at first, but they can cause a lot of damage and hurt feelings. Synecdoches created the miserly Jew, the thieving Indian, the lazy black, and the mythical welfare mother—all individual characters made to define entire groups.
But wait a minute. Doesn’t the metonymy commit the same crime? What about the Redskins, for instance? Isn’t that a characteristic that represents all Native Americans (and not just a football team)? Yes, indeed. And “blacks,” for that matter, also constitute a metonymy. Same with calling elderly women “bluehairs.”
The fact is, synecdoche and metonymy are close cousins, especially when it comes to the darker shade of the dark art. If you call someone a Pollyanna or a Betty or, I don’t know, a Khaleesi, are you referring to a type? Then you’re using a synecdoche. Or are you describing the person by a characteristic? In that case it’s a metonymy. Khaleesi is the Mother of Dragons. That’s a metonymy, because even in Game of Thrones a young woman does not emit dragon eggs, and it would be awkward to call her Foster Mother of Dragons. Now, if her followers called her Mother of the Dragon, then that would be a synecdoche, because she fosters more than one dragon. And when Beyoncé tells a lover to “put a ring on it,” most rhetoricians qualify that as a synecdoche. The ring is a part of the whole marriage industrial complex. But you could say it’s a metonymy, because the ring is a signifier of engagement.
I know, I know. It’s a mess. Even rhetoricians through the ages wasted ink and agony on arguing which was which. That’s why I like to lump the metonymy and synecdoche together and call them both “belonging tropes.” They take something that belongs to a thing or individual or group and make it represent the whole shebang. Or the reverse.
Now, assuming that you will not become a rhetoric scholar yourself, it’s less important to slap a label on the trope than it is to think about how these tropes work. When you zoom your audience’s mental camera in, then make your audience think just of that one person or piece of clothing or part of the body or skin color or action, you do more than show how clever or poetic you are. You potentially color the audience’s entire attitude.
For instance, you and your friends spot a group of fit men on the beach and forevermore refer to them as the abs: this metonymy (or is it a synecdoche?) defines those men. You don’t think about how one of them may be a future rabbi and another might be an extraordinary rap artist. They’re abs. All of them. You have to admire the power, and appreciate the potential evil.
I don’t know any part of rhetoric that sums up the art’s moral ambiguity better than that.
Hyperbole: Molehills to Moonshots
Full confession: I love to exaggerate. I’m probably the most enthusiastic exaggerator in the world, having exaggerated millions and millions of times. I turn molehills into Everests—no, entire Himalayas. If I were a planet, I’d be a gas giant. My friends actually spent some serious time in a bar trying to calculate exactly how much I tend to exaggerate on any particular occasion. They came up with the Heinrichs Exaggeration Factor, which, they concluded, is exactly thirty. They said I take a true fact and invariably multiply it by thirty. I told them that was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard in my life and that they had only said it because each of them had drunk sixty beers.
While it is true that I exaggerate, this puts me in a fine American tradition going back from Donald Trump through Muhammad Ali to Paul Bunyan and John Henry and the entire state of Texas. You know how they say everything’s bigger in Texas? That’s mostly hyperbole. I have spent a lot of time in Texas, where I encounter much small talk and smaller drinks. Texas is where you find five-gallon men in ten-gallon hats, or (to coin a synecdoche and a metonymy) men who are all hat, no cattle. Still, as Texans will tell you, they’re the Americanest of all Americans, which is why they love that most American of tropes, the hyperbole. There’s an off-color joke about Texans (which I’m hoping you’ll get only if you’re old enough). Two of them are standing on a bridge, relieving themselves into the river below. One of them leers at the other and says, “Water down there sure is cold.”
“Yep,” says the other. “Deep, too.”
Of course, if you were a third party to this conversation, you could say, “That’s climate change for you.” Then explain how global water levels are rising due to…oh, never mind.
With the possible exception of irony, hyperbole is the trope that lends itself best to humor. Another Texas story: A rancher brags to a stranger in a bar, “It takes three hours to drive across my land.” The stranger nods sympathetically and replies, “I used to have a truck like that.”
Useful Trope
Actually, “pouring across the border” qualifies as a metonymy as well as a hyperbole. The imitation of pouring serves for the act of mass immigration.
These jokes help show why I think hyperbole belongs among the tropes. Like its sisters the metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche, the hyperbole plays pretend with reality. All three tropes blow things up or shrink them. But the hyperbole, unlike its sneakier siblings, makes itself easier to spot if you pay attention. When someone says it’s raining cats and dogs, you don’t have to call the SPCA. Even when an opponent of immigration claims that foreigners are “pouring across the border,” you know you’re h
earing a trope. Masses of people don’t cross all at once. Besides, it’s hard to pour a human. Humans are too clumpy.
Besides distorting reality, though, the hyperbole can point to possibilities, bucking us up, inspiring us to do more. The word hyperbole comes from the Greek (as always!), meaning “throw beyond.” It projects our minds outward, and we can choose whether or not to follow it. This is our moonshot of tropes, a stellar probe of belief. You can use the hyperbole to talk yourself into becoming bigger, faster, stronger, and richer, making you happier and more awesome than you ever imagined in your entire life!
Hey, divide my claim by thirty and it’s still awesome.
Profanity: How to Fail at Hogwarts
Years ago, when I worked at Dartmouth College, I invited my family to have dinner with entering students at the Ravine Lodge, a big log cabin at the base of a mountain. We sat on benches at a long table, with five-year-old Dorothy Jr. next to a strapping young man. Like the other new students, he had just spent two nights hiking in the mountains of New Hampshire, and he was ravenous. In his haste to bring a leg of barbecued chicken to his mouth, the student dropped it onto his lap and uttered the f-word. He glanced, embarrassed, at his little blond pigtailed seatmate and then looked up at me. “Sorry,” he said.
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