1568: Metonymy Mar 31, 2019

While it's true that sometimes streets have been used as a sort of nickname for a larger entity, such as with Wall Street as discussed yesterday, this phenomenon has a much larger scope. This is called 'metonymy', from Greek, literally 'changing the name', and it can happen to just about anything. Some common examples include 'suit' for a businessmen, and 'The Pentagon' for the United States Department of Defense. These could be classified as synonyms, because in effect that is what is going on, but these are specifically from something that has direct connotation to the original word, but is related to something more acute, like in these cases outfit or location. If you have any others, include it in a comment.

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