metonymy

Definition:

A figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated (such as "crown" for "royalty").

Metonymy is also the rhetorical strategy of describing something indirectly by referring to things around it, such as describing someone's clothing to characterize the individual. Adjective: metonymic.

See also:

• Metonym
• Antonomasia
• Denominal Verb
• Figurative Language
• Metaphor
• Synecdoche
• Tom Wolfe's Status Details
• Top 20 Figures of Speech

Etymology:

From the Greek, "change of name"

Examples and Observations:

• "Many standard items of vocabulary are metonymic. A red-letter day is important, like the feast days marked in red on church calendars. . . . On the level of slang, a redneck is a stereotypical member of the white rural working class in the Southern U.S., originally a reference to necks sunburned from working in the fields."
  (Connie Eble, "Metonymy." The Oxford Companion to the English Language, 1992)



• "Fear gives wings."
  (Romanian proverb)



• "Detroit is still hard at work on an SUV that runs on rain forest trees and panda blood."
  (Conan O'Brien)



• "Metonymy is common in cigarette advertising in countries where legislation prohibits depictions of the cigarettes themselves or of people using them."
  (Daniel Chandler, Semiotics. Routledge, 2007)



• "I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver Wig, and I never saw her again."
  (Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep)



• "One of the favorite American metonymic processes is the one in which a part of a longer expression is used to stand for the whole expression. Here are some examples for the 'part of an expression for the whole expression' metonymy in American English:

  Danish for Danish pastry
  shocks for shock absorbers
  wallets for wallet-sized photos
  Ridgemont High for Ridgemont High School
  the States for the United States

  (Zoltán Kövecses, American English: An Introduction. Broadview, 2000)



• The White House asked the television networks for air time on Monday night.



• "Whitehall prepares for a hung parliament."
  (The Guardian, January 1, 2009)



• The suits on Wall Street walked off with most of our savings.



• "The B.L.T. left without paying."
  (waitress referring to a customer)



• "Metaphor creates the relation between its objects, while metonymy presupposes that relation."
  (Hugh Bredin, "Metonymy." Poetics Today, 1984)



• "Metonymy and metaphor also have fundamentally different functions. Metonymy is about referring: a method of naming or identifying something by mentioning something else which is a component part or symbolically linked. In contrast, metaphor is about understanding and interpretation: it is a means to understand or explain one phenomenon by describing it in terms of another."
  (Murray Knowles and Rosamund Moon, Introducing Metaphor. Routledge, 2006)



• "If metaphor works by transposing qualities from one plane of reality to another, metonymy works by associating meanings within the same plane. . . . The representation of reality inevitably involves a metonym: we choose a part of 'reality' to stand for the whole. The urban settings of television crime serials are metonyms--a photographed street is not meant to stand for the street itself, but as a metonym of a particular type of city life--inner-city squalor, suburban respectability, or city-centre sophistication."
  (John Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies, 2nd ed. Routledge, 1992)

Pronunciation: me-TON-uh-me

Also Known As: denominatio, misnamer, transmutation