"Metonymy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dissertation on the use of those words. Yet, even in his latest work, he sometimes misplaced them ludicrously. No man uses figures of speech with more propriety because he knows that one figure is called a metonymy and another a synecdoche. A drayman in a passion calls out, "You are a pretty fellow.", without suspecting that he is uttering irony, and that irony is one of the four primary tropes. The old systems of rhetoric were never ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... As the apostles, prophets, and teachers are here set down concretely, and not abstractly, and are confessed to be three distinct orders enumerated: so all the other five, though set down abstractly, are (by a metonymy of the adjunct for the subject) to be understood concretely, helps for helpers; governments for governors, &c.; otherwise we shall here charge the apostle with a needless impertinent tautology in this chapter, for he had formerly spoken of these gifts abstractly, ver. 8-10, as being ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... the rock which followed the Israelites? Paul says the rock. But commentators seem generally to agree that the "rock" is here put by metonymy for the water of the rock, Barnes says, "It would be absurd to suppose that the rock that was smitten by Moses literally followed them in the wilderness." Just why it is more "absurd" to suppose the rock followed them, than the stream from a stationary fountain ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... and cabin-boy on board a "horse-jockey;" one of those vessels which carry horses, mules, and other cattle to the West Indies; a title bestowed upon them by sailors, who are very much in the habit of indulging in that figure of speech called by rhetoricians metonymy; in this instance applying the genuine name of all Connecticut men, and some Rhode Islanders, to a fore-topsail schooner, or hermaphrodite brig, as the case might be. He was next, by a sort of metamorphosis, or rather metastasis, not uncommon with those of "steady habits," ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... snore. Never did I hear any thing more sonorously grand and awful than that portentous inbreathing of Gog and Magog, resounding through the Gothic vastness of Guildhall; but, behold! how omnipotent is the dreaming imagination! I myself had been dozing; the sound of my own nose, transferred by a metonymy of the fancy to the nostrils of those wooden idols, had become, as it were, the living apotheosis of a snore, which had subdued me by its sublimity. Most fortunate was it that I awoke; for, on attentively inspecting ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... never sounded (then perhaps not nine) but the midnight hour, to that worthy archdeacon, with more of the character of its locality, than the visual aspect of Magdalen represents the beautiful city to one in its entirety. It seems a sort of metonymy; Maudlin put for Oxford. The walk is, after all, but a sober path, worthy by association with one of the walks of Eden. Yet it shows no gay foliage, nor "shade above shade a woody theatre," such as is seen on a mountain declivity. It is a simple shadowy walk—shadowy to richness, cool, tranquil, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude |
