Synecdoche

metonymy

Metonymy is a figure of speech (i.e. a thing we do to make language more fancy or poetic) that replaces the name of something with the name of something else it’s closely associated with, but isn’t a part of. Got it? Nope, me neither. Let’s look at a famous example of metonymy: ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’ (from Edward Bulwer Lytton’s play Richelieu, BTdubz – good to know in case it ever comes up in a pub quiz). The ‘pen’ refers to the written word, and the ‘sword’ is military power – so both ‘pen’ and ‘sword’ are representations of something else that they’re associated with. (Personally I’d rather have a sword than a pen in most situations, for example a zombie apocalypse, but that might just be because I watch too many horror films.)

Some other more modern examples of metonymy are:

  • ‘Hollywood’ to refer to all celebs, film directors and producers and so on

  • ‘top brass’ for management types

  • ‘new blood’ for new people or ideas

  • ‘the big house’ for prison.

It’s probably fairly unlikely that you’ll find yourself in a situation where it might be an issue, but try not to confuse metonymy with synedoche (pronounced si-nek-duh-keen – although I’ve never heard anyone say it out loud). Synecdoche is when you talk about a thing using the name of one of its parts. So it’s a bit more literal than metonymy – like calling business people ‘suits’, or your car your ‘wheels’ (although if you do either of those I’m afraid you might be a prick).