Synecdoche, Metonymy, and Empathy

As an editorial freelancer, I’ve grumped about covering literary terms like synecdoche and metonymy in language arts lessons. The names are arcane, the distinctions are tricky, and most students will never use these terms outside of class. So why should they care? Let’s just make some nice similes to describe a child’s laughter or a cat’s purr.

Today I’m here to say why we should care: synecdoche and metonymy are not just turns of phrase but powerful ways of thinking about other people and the world.

Figurative language is so integral to our worldviews that we may not even notice we’re thinking non-literally. Both the beauty and the danger is that it bypasses our reasoning minds to engage our feelings. So when politicians and clever rhetoricians employ these devices, we may not realize we’re being manipulated.

Synecdoche and metonymy in particular can promote dehumanizing generalizations about other people. Add in instant mass communication and modern weapons, and these rhetorical devices can and do get people killed.

On a lighter note, both end in an ee sound, so you can sing them to the tune of Frederick Frahnkensteen’s nightmare in Young Frankenstein.

Synecdoche: no escaping that for me

This figure of speech uses a part of something to represent the whole, or vice versa.

Lend me your ears.
Give us this day our daily bread.

”There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;”
—T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

“All at once the Jew also becomes liberal and begins to rave about the necessary progress of mankind.” —Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

“I'm mighty glad Georgia waited till after Christmas before it secedes or it would have ruined the Christmas parties.” —Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

Every time you refer to a place but mean the people in it, that’s synecdoche. Every time you take part of a population or category and make it stand for the whole, that’s synecdoche, too. (Whether or not you’re telling the truth about anything is a different matter.) Without this part-to-whole thinking, there could be no concept of a nation-state; there also could be no wars or genocides. At its worst, synecdoche is the language of “us” and “them.” It makes a group of people with all their individual features and complexities into the enemy, like a Frankenstein monster cobbled together from distortions, lies, and nightmares.

Our tumultuous times are brought to you by synecdoche and its close cousin, metonymy.

Metonymy: what somebody wields in your name

Metonymy links two different things that are conceptually related.

It would be synecdoche if my chiropractor called out to his receptionist, “Send in the next spine.” But if he said “send in the next wallet,” that would be metonymy: identifying me by an object that represents me to him. Either way, I’d probably bolt out the door and find a doctor who saw me as a whole person.

Metonymy may be direct or implied. My favorite example of implied metonymy is a cartoon of a mouse staring up at bat and exclaiming, “OMG! An angel!” First I laugh at the little mouse who mistakes bat wings for angel wings, and then I laugh at myself for thinking I know what an angel looks like. I haven’t a clue, only a concept, though I may have met angels in disguise.

The most famous metonymy in English literature was quill-penned in 1839 by Sir Edgar Bulwer-Lytton:

The pen is mightier than the sword.

This adage casting words as weapons is double metonymy: the pen stands for writing and the sword for military force. It’s also probably the truest thing ever written by an author whose language is so florid, a contest for bad writing was named after him.1

The Pen as Weapon or…?

Politicians and revolutionaries love metonymy, maybe because they view the rest of us as wallets and pawns. I think of Netanyahu brandishing a piece of wreckage from an Iranian drone during one of his speeches. On one level, the prop is synecdoche for the drone itself. But as explained by Ayelet Kohn in Props as visual arguments in the political speeches of Binyamin Netanyahu, it also serves as metonymy for “the Iranian threat” that he’s been claiming is an imminent danger to Israel for more than a decade.

Rhetorical props like the drone piece aren’t meant to convey facts about a specific problem for which the speaker is proposing a specific solution. Instead they are meant to scare people enough that they’ll unthinkingly accept any actions that the speaker claims are necessary. The quickest way to bypass people’s reason, caution, and empathy is to press the fear button, and metonymy is an effective way to do that.

I recently watched a 1970 interview with Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian novelist who led the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Kanafani was young and handsome, like those hipster t-shirt stencils of Che Guevara. He also demonstrated the difference between synecdoche and metonymy in a single sentence.

“Why not just talk?”
“Talk to whom?”
“Talk to the Israeli leaders.”
“That’s kind of conversation between the sword and the neck.”

The sword and the neck: one inhuman, existing only to wound; the other, a body part representing sacrificial victimhood. Neither accurately represents any group of people, but at least a neck is a part of a human being.

Kanafani’s rhetoric inspired airplane hijackings and the 1972 Lod airport attack that killed 28 people. Shortly after that attack, the Mossad blew up his car with Kanafani and his 17-year-old niece in it. His obituary in the Lebanon Daily Star read:

He was a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages.

I don’t know what the child’s obituary said. I do know that grieving parents on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are sick unto death of extremists pledging “the last drop” of innocent people’s blood for a cause.

I wrote an earlier version of this post a few years ago. Since then, the violence in that region has escalated unimaginably. I can’t see the way forward past the next precarious ceasefire, but I know a way must exist. Swords have been dropped before at the stroke of a pen.

Zoom Out and Then Back In

If we’re going to make it to the next decade, the next century, the first step must be to remember the whole that we’re all a part of. A powerful vision of it comes from astronauts describing the Overview Effect, the ineffable experience of seeing Earth from space.

And again, for most astronauts, the feeling that the Earth itself is a whole system, and we’re just a part of it. We need to think of ourselves as part of this organic system, if you will. And then there are other things that come out of it…one of them is that we are really all in this together. Our fate is bound up with people that we may think are really different…ultimately, we are connected. Totally connected. And not only with people, but with life….I mean, you could say, I know that. I know we’re all connected. I know our differences don’t matter that much. But again, it’s knowing it with the brain and not the heart.
—Frank White, The Overview Effect episode of NASA’s Houston We Have a Podcast

The next step, I think, is to zoom all the way back in. I wrote in another post:

People bring many lessons back from space, but they never come back saying that a single life doesn’t matter. The message is always, always the opposite.

From a great distance I see the blue-green planet floating in an inky void. It’s so peaceful from here. Then over the earth’s curvature stomps a giant Frankenstein monster patched together from parts. It lurches across continents, loses its footing, and then floats off into space.

Now I zoom in and zoom in until I see a child curled in a chair, reading. Her fragile, supple neck bends over the book cradled in her arms. Because I only know what I know, it’s a book that I loved as a child, A Wrinkle in Time. She goes so deeply into the story that she is all the characters: Meg, Charles Wallace, and the angels Mrs. Who, Which, and Whatsit, too. Maybe she even dips into the mind of the evil brain, IT, before centering herself back into Meg to defeat the monster with love. As the child reads, lost to the world, someone—one of the people who loves her and keeps her safe, who tries to make the world a safer place to be—walks by and gently tucks her hair out of her eyes.