One of the most reckless things you can do is send me to the market with a shopping list. To me, shopping is just an excuse to be a delinquent. I\u2019ll buy a few random things that catch my eye and, well, that\u2019s pretty much all I\u2019ll do. This explains the box of cookies on the floor. It also explains how I\u2019ve got a cool new word to play with: metonym. See? Shopping can lead to all sorts of adventures, at least if you know how to do it wrong.<\/p>\n
First of all, let\u2019s take a look at these cookies. They came in a box, of course, but this isn\u2019t just any box. It is a metal \u201cretro radio\u201d box. It looks like an old-fashioned portable radio from back when a radio was the size of a lunch box. And, in fact, this thing opens like a lunch box. I thought it was cool. That\u2019s why I bought the cookies.<\/p>\n
While the world\u2019s marketing pros rub their hands in glee that rubes like me still exist, I\u2019m going to note a linguistic angle here: I had bought the things contained (the cookies) for the container (the metal box). Put in those terms, this quirky event gives me no end of amusement.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not the only one, and, in fact, this is some old shtick. \u201cA Thing Contained For the Container\u201d as opposed to \u201ca Container For The Thing Contained\u201d was a riff from American author James Thurber. In his 1942 short story, Here Lies Miss Groby, Thurber gets obsessed with the notion.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a famous example of the concept, not from Thurber, but from history: \u201cFriends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears.\u201d This phrase is not beseeching people to cut off their ears and pass them to the orator. The term \u201cears,\u201d of course, signifies the hearing that the ears contain. In other words, as they say in the military: \u201clisten up.\u201d<\/p>\n
So with this example we see a Container (ears) For The Things Contained (hearing).<\/p>\n
Would you believe there\u2019s a fancy word for this technique of language? There is. It\u2019s \u201cmetonym.\u201d<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know many \u201cnym\u201d words, so this one is a shiny new addition to my thin inventory.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s see, there\u2019s \u201csynonym\u201d for words that mean the same thing. There\u2019s \u201cantonym\u201d for words that mean opposite things. There\u2019s \u201chomonym\u201d for words that have the same spelling but different meanings.<\/p>\n
And, there\u2019s \u201cmomnthym.\u201d This is the most important word on my list. It\u2019s a Southern contraction for \u201cmom and them.\u201d If you ever go to the land of Dixie and someone asks, \u201cHow\u2019s your momnthym?\u201d you can just say, \u201cThey are fine, suh, and they send their regards.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anyway, back to this metonym thing. We use them all the time without even thinking about it. If I mention that a popular brew is the \u201cisland\u2019s favorite beer,\u201d I don\u2019t mean that the island likes to drink beer. Islands are hunks of rock. They don\u2019t imbibe. What I mean, of course, is that the inhabitants like to drink the beer. The container (the island) is used as a reference for the things contained (the people on the island). That\u2019s our Marianas metonym.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll just pull a couple of other examples out of thin air, not because you care, but because I have nothing else to think about. We can say, for example, \u201cThe entire bus was scared when the driver hit the brakes,\u201d or, \u201cThe classroom heaved a sigh of relief when the teacher canceled the test.\u201d If you took these sentences literally, they wouldn\u2019t make any sense. But, of course, they do make sense, thanks to the magical power of the metonym.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure that deep within the bowels of some giant think-tank, an Artificial Intelligence technician is listing as many metonyms as possible. That way, in the future, when you\u2019re eating dinner and you tell your Jeeves 2.0 Butler-bot to pass the salt, the robot will hand you the shaker instead of showering you with grains of salt.<\/p>\n
Well, thus far, if you\u2019re keeping score, you may have noted that we\u2019re up against a stacked deck. The Container For The Thing Contained is represented with abundant examples. By contrast, it\u2019s a bit harder to come up with an example of a Thing Contained For The Container.<\/p>\n
This was Thurber\u2019s problem, and the central issue in Here Lies Miss Groby. Thurber finally concocts a solution, so let\u2019s join the story at this point and lend him our ears:<\/p>\n
\u201cIf a woman were to grab up a bottle of Grade A and say to her husband, \u2018Get away from me or I\u2019ll hit you with the milk,\u2019 that would be a Thing Contained for the Container.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thus spoke Thurber. Problem solved.<\/p>\n
But if you think getting hit with the milk hurts, let me tell you that getting beaned with the cookies is no picnic, either.<\/p>\n
I really hope that your holiday preparations are going better than ours are. In the meantime, please tell your momnthym that I send my regards for Thanksgiving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the most reckless things you can do is send me to the market…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8301,8302,67,50],"class_list":["post-214963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-james-thurber","tag-people","tag-power"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}