Another tense finish

Well, England have managed to set things up for a dramatic final session again -- how do they do it? I thought being able to follow more of the cricket would be a consolation for starting work at 8 all this week, but it's been more like a bed of torment...

Edit: phew, all done now, draw saved as the middle order come good!

Mo's Rather Interesting World of Figures of Speech and Other Rhetorical Devices

#9 in an occasional series -- your challenge is to use it at least once today.

Synecdoche

Literally, something like "to take with something else".

Means: representing something by referring to a part of it (or vice versa). The classsic examples are referring to soldiers as "swords", workers as "hands", etc. Also used to represent something by referring to what it's made out of, eg. "willow / leather" for cricket bat / ball, "steel" for sword and so on.

Those examples all sound a bit cheesy... what about some modern ones? How about "Number Ten" to mean the Prime Minister -- that's the reverse usage. Similarly "Washington" to mean the US government, etc. Or eg. talking about "the feeling on the street" to mean "the feeling among the sort of people whom one might find in the street".

Synecdoche is a special type of metonymy, in which you refer to something by an associated term, eg. "the crown" to mean the institution of the monarchy. The distinction is that in synecdoche the term used must be a part of (or must include) the thing you're actually talking about, whereas in metonymy in general it just has to be assoeicated with it somehow.