Synecdoche

“But he”, Temple said, pointing to Cranly, “he is a ballocks, too, like
me. Only he doesn’t know it. And that’s the only difference I see.”
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Synecdoche (in this case neither the town nor film) is a linguistic styling that is used widely in a colloquial form in Ireland, but also more generally throughout the anglophone world, and most other languages. It was first recorded in Greek drama.

Synecdoche is a play on double-meaning, conversational understanding and our tendencies toward generalisation. As such, a whole may be referred to by a part (a car being called a motor or a set of wheels), a container referring to its contents (give that baby a bottle; ie. not some milk or infant formula), a class referring to a wider grouping (auto referring to any specific kind of motorcar, hoover being used to refer to vacuum cleaners). We can also refer to a thing by a quality of it (spectacles referred to as glasses).

Read 50s Beat prose and poetry and you’ll learn about ‘the man’. We can rage against ‘the machine’. Rastafarians will deplore most of us as ‘baldheads’ who live in ‘Babylon’.

There are plenty of examples of synecdoche in action, especially when a quality is used as a collective pronoun. It is not necessary to trawl through mighty tomes or stiff literature – synecdoche is used by most of us conversationally.

It is, of course, at its apogee used when referring to someone as a bollix, prick, cunt or otherwise.

Bibliography
Wikipedia’ entry on Synecdoche

This article was posted by Ronan McDonnell on Friday, April 27th, 2012 at 13:19.
It is archived in Short Post and tagged grammar, language, playful, rhetoric, style, writing.

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