January 2011

I stashed an email from Dr. Goodword that used this word since I was familiar with it but had no idea what it meant. My stash is pretty filled with future items for this section of the email. It wasn't my plan to use it today until I started a new book last night and encountered the word on the first page.

Here's Dr. Goodword's description, which I think I grasp.

Meaning: 1. The metaphorical technique of naming a specific part when referring to the whole. 2. Naming the whole to indicate a part.

Notes: Today's Good Word is the proper literary term for a habit that is ubiquitous in common speech. The adjective for it is synecdochic(al) and you may use the adverb when you speak synecdochically. The practice of using synecdoches is synecdochism.

In Play: You avail yourself of synecdoche every time you say a neighbor lives two doors down the street, meaning houses. When your teenaged son whose English grades are low says, "I can't go out tonight, the 'rents have the wheels," he is saying "car" with one of the major rhetorical devices of English. The reverse situation, using a whole to refer to a part, is also synecdoche: "I think Ghana is going to beat Brazil in the World Cup," besides being wishful thinking, is a synecdoche in which wholes (Ghana, Brazil) refer to only parts of themselves (the Ghanan [sic] and Brazilian soccer teams).

Memory, the original virtual reality, operates doubly like a hologram or a synecdoche: it's vividly unreal, and the enlargeable whole is nested in each of its fragments.

I was immediately grabbed by the idea of memory as the original virtual reality. I grasp that it is enlargeable. But help me, how is the whole nested in each of its fragments? Anyway, I'm working on that concept. And Robin does write beautifully, so I expect to struggle over some other vaguely familiar words that I don't really know.