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There was something weird, and something fascinating, about these impressive words issuing from an unseen and unexpected source. The night was so still and ghostlike the atmosphere about the cottage so charged with tragedy the metonymy this invisible speaker employed so subtle! "Whar's yoh gyard'ner?" she asked breathlessly. "I don't know," he gave a short laugh.
He did not approve of Stewart exactly, not from any dislike of the man, but from a lack of fineness in the man himself an intangible thing that seems to be a matter of that unfashionable essence, the soul, as against the clay; of the thing contained, by an inverse metonymy, for the container. Boyer, a nerve man from Texas, met him on the street, and they walked to Stewart's apartment together.
Though the metonymy of bread-earner for a shoeblack's knife may not equal these in elegance, it perhaps surpasses them in ingenuity. I gives it him up to Lamprey in the bread-basket. Homer is happy in his description of wounds, but this surpasses him in the characteristic choice of circumstance.
By a well-known figure of speech, called metonymy, we use a word denoting the means by which we accomplish anything to denote the end accomplished; we exercise care over anything by means of foresight, and indicate that care by the word foresight. On the same principle the word Providence is used to signify the care God takes of the universe.
The Rhetoricians call this an Hypallage, because one word is substituted for another: but the Grammarians call it a Metonymy, because the words are shifted and interchanged.
It may be urged that the employer's profits also represent the livings of a number of human beings; but this passes nowadays for a reactionary view. "We stand for man as against the dollar." If you say that the "dollar" is metonymy for "the man possessed of a dollar," with rights to defend, and reasonable expectations to be realized, you convict yourself of reaction.
To sky is a new verb, which none but a master hand could have coined: a more splendid metonymy could not be applied upon a more trivial occasion; the lofty idea of raising a metal to the skies is substituted for the mean thought of tossing up a halfpenny. Our orator compresses his hyperbole into a single word.
She bowled over one pupil with "microcosm," another the next minute with "metonymy "; "nymphean" and "naphtha" sent two more to their seats; while the silent "m" in "mnemonics" cut a most fearful swath in the remainder, so that after the smoke of that bomb was dissipated only Julia, Ruth, and two others stood of all the class.
He was beginning to make sounds now, and had achieved the word "puss-ee". This originally had signified the woolly kitten he carried with him, but now by a metonymy it had come to include all kinds of living things; and great was the delight of the parents when a big red automobile flashed past, and the baby pointed his finger, exclaiming gleefully, "Puss-ee!"
"I would rather have a good symbol of my thought," he confesses, "than the suffrage of Kant or of Plato." "All thinking is analogizing, and it is the use of life to learn metonymy." His passion for analogy betrays him here and there in his Journals, as in this passage: "The water we wash with never speaks of itself, nor does fire or wind or tree. Neither does a noble natural man," and so forth.
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