Metonymy, or The Husband's Revenge
Metonymy, or the Husband's Revenge Rachel de Queiroz Metonymy. I learned the word in 1930 and shall never forget it. I had just published my first novel. A literary critic had scolded me because my hero went out into the night “chest unbuttoned.” “What deplorable nonsense!” wrote this eminently sensible gentleman. “Why does she not say what she means? Obviously, it was his shirt that was unbuttoned, not his chest.” I accepted his rebuke with humility, indeed with shame. But my illustrious Latin professor, Dr. Matos Peixoto came to my rescue. He said that what I had written was perfectly correct; that I had used a respectable figure of speech known as metonymy; and that this figure consisted in the use of one word for another word associated with it—for example, a word representing a cause instead of the effect, or representing the container when the content is intended. The classic instance, he told me, is “the sparkling cup”; in reality, not the cup but the wine in it is sparkli...