A week in metonymy: From the personal to the political

Last week was metonymy week for me. In this post I’ll tell you three stories about metonymy, all related to a train ride to and from Oxford with my husband – a sort of anniversary trip, as we met there in 1985.

Before I tell my stories, a quick reminder of how metonymy works in language. A child pointing at an oily puddle and saying “Look! A dead rainbow” establishes a novel conceptual relation between a puddle and a rainbow, and in doing so creates a metaphor. A passenger looking out of a plane window at the end of the 1990s while flying into Heathrow and saying “Look! BSE” exploits a given conceptual relationship between (at the time) cows and mad cow disease, and in doing so creates a metonymy. More well-established examples of metonymies are “The kettle is boiling” or “The White House decided”, exploiting existing relationships, in this instance between container and contents – we shall come back to the White House!

Metonymic coffee

My week in metonymy started when having ‘a coffee’ at Nottingham railway station. The coffee cup – see image – had the inscription: “coffee Noun (kofi) the roasted seeds (called coffee beans) of a tropical bush; a powder made from them. A hot drink made from coffee powder and hot water.”

I wondered about posting a nerdy little quip on Bluesky saying: “Sitting on the train, having a metonymy”, but I refrained. Then I started to think… Is coffee really a metonymy? Some searching led me to a whole article which was so prototypically academic, I laughed out loud and startled my husband and fellow passengers. But I should not have laughed, as the authors put a lot of work into it. It also was totally in line with an article we had once written ourselves about ‘serial metonymy’, the type of metonymy that I imagined being at work on my coffee cup, where meaning creeps metonymically from seeds to powder to drink and finally to the cup.

The article that had amused me was entitled “Lexical representation of the notion coffee in present-day English” and one part of the abstract says: “The polysemous lexeme possesses a six-component structure, the basic lexico-semantic variant of which fixes the idea of a drink and is characterized by the double axiology of its connotation. It was established that the other meanings were formed because of a metonymic shift.” There you have it!

Metonymic memories

Then I got a Google Scholar alert for an article by Ray Gibbs on “The metonymic body” which is part of a special issue on metonymy of the journal Metaphor and the Social World.

That reminded me of listening to Ray giving a talk on “Speaking and thinking with metonymy” in 1996 at a metonymy workshop in Hamburg organised by Günther Radden and Klaus-Uwe Panther at which Zazie Todd and I gave a talk on metonymy in language acquisition called ‘Mummy I like being a sandwich’. The talk was co-authored by my husband and based on something our son had said when coming home from school. He had started school in January 1995. At first, we thought he might eat the school dinners. But he didn’t like them and insisted on bringing his own lunch box like most of his friends. In the end we relented and, walking to school in the morning, he brandished his lunch box saying to everybody he met: “I love being a lunch box.” Then he thought a bit and said: “I love being a sandwich, I really like being a sandwich” – one could really see the metonymical chain extend from his arm through the lunch box to the sandwich and back.

By 1996 I was quite deeply into metonymy and into my new life in England which had started out with a metonymy a decade earlier.

In 1985 I had got a Junior Research Fellowship in general linguistics at Wolfson College Oxford. While travelling over from Germany on the ferry I read the Wolfson College prospectus and put a cross near a book entitled Language and Action, as I had just written my PhD on the history of conceptions of language and action in 19th-century French linguistics. At my first official meal in college, I sat beside a guy and started chatting with him. He told me his name was David Clarke and I said: “Oh, so you are the book!” A year later we were married and a few years later we had our son who then gave us ideas for studying metonymy in language acquisition.

Even before his birth, metonymy was a constant subject of jokes and conversations between us and in 1992 we wrote an article together where we said something that still stands, I think: “The trick of being innovative and at the same time understandable is to use words in a novel way the meaning of which is self-evident. But there are only two main ways of going about that: using words for the near neighbours of things you mean (metonymy) or using words for the look-alikes (resemblars) of what you mean (metaphor).” The first strategy is based on exploiting a shared world, the second on exploiting shared knowledge.

Metonymic destruction

On the train back from Oxford a few days later I read two things. One was a headline in The Guardian, echoing many other headlines: “Trump takes a wrecking ball to the White House in on-the-nose metaphor”. This reminded me of the many emergent or situational metaphors that have come to symbolise this destructive era in American politics, from the skuttling of the S.S. United States at the beginning of this year to the demolition of the East Wing of the White House at the end.

In the Guardian headline the demolishing of the East Wing symbolises (metonymically) the destruction of the whole institution that is ‘The White House’. This brings me to a post I read by Hannah Waters who wrote in response to one of the viral photos of the destruction: “It’s a very calculated psychic attack. The White House is a metonym for the presidency. A visual representation of his efforts to fundamentally and irreversibly change the presidency.”

This made me think. As we have seen at the beginning, utterances like ‘The White House decides…’ or ‘The White House declares…’ have always been prototypical examples for ‘a metonymy’, just as ‘Juliet is the sun’ is a prototypical example for ‘a metaphor’. ‘The White House’ metonymically stands for the people inside the White House and more broadly is a symbol or icon of the institution of the American presidency. That metonymy carries weight; it has history and a certain dignity. Now this has changed. As Hannah said in a reply to a remark I made along these lines: “Our shared mental image/symbol of the presidency no longer aligns with the reality of it.” As somebody else posted (referencing the professor of journalism Jay Rosen): “The metonymy [of the ‘White House’] has broken down.“

Now that the real White House has been broken up and demolished, at least partially, and now that even the metonymy of ‘The White House’ has broken down, what is one to do? Some call for the White House to be rebuilt. A post on Bluesky said: “Not enough of you believe me right now, but ‘Rebuild The White House’ is going to become one of the most popular slogans in American political history” and somebody else replied: “We must mean this literally and with all of the implied metonymy. We need to rebuild the literal White House and we need to rebuild the office and institution of the United States presidency.”

Metonymies, metonymies, metonymies

In the three stories about my week in metonymy I have moved from the personal and intimate – the coffee, the sandwich and the book – to the political and institutional – the White House. These are only some examples of the metonymies we live by. Metonymies come in many shapes and forms and can be based on all sorts of relationships that we observe in the world, that we know about and that we act upon, from kettles to Kremlins.

Metonymies trace a rich tapestry of connections in the world and in our brains, between cause and effect (The pen is mightier than the sword), place and institution (Wall Street is in chaos), part and whole (All hands-on deck) and most of all container and content (The kettle is boiling).

In my stories I have mainly focused on container/content metonymies (there was also a cause-effect metonymy in the form of ‘the book’). In case of the coffee, I noticed the metonymic meaning almost literally travelling through containers (seeds → powder → drink → cup). In case of our son’s sandwich, we observed how he became the container and then the content, gleefully collapsing the distance between self and lunch box and then sandwich. In both cases the metonymical relations that are exploited are relatively stable and predictable. But then we came to the White House. Here I and many others saw the container itself being physically destroyed and iconic metonymic relationships breaking down. The building no longer reliably ‘contains’ what it symbolised, namely the American presidency.

Metonymies rely on stable, shared relationships and reference points, between things in proximity, containers and contents, institutions and their symbols. These relationships can be fragile and when the physical container is demolished, the conceptual relationship shatters too. Metonymies and, of course, metaphors too, rely on collective agreements and shared social representations. We must work hard at maintaining them.

Further literature

Nerlich, B. (1998). La métaphore et la métonymie: Aux sources rhétoriques de la sémantique moderne. Sémiotiques 14 (special issue “Sens, figures, signaux. Quelques enjeux historiques de la sémantique, ed. by Christian Puech), 143–170.

Nerlich, B. (2006). Metonymy. In: In K. S. Goodman & Y. M. Goodman (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier, pp. 109-113.

Nerlich, B. (2010). Metaphor and metonymy. In: A. Jucker & I. Taavitsainen (eds.), Historical Pragmatics. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 193–218.

Nerlich, B. & Clarke, D. D. (1992). Outline of a model for semantic change. In: G. Kellermann & M. D. Morrissey (eds.), Diachrony within Synchrony: Language History and Cognition. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 125–144. (for an overview see here)

Nerlich, B., Clarke, D. D., & Todd, Z. (1999). Mummy, I like being a sandwich. Metonymy in Language Acquistion. In: K.-U. Panther & G. Radden (eds), Metonymy in Language and Thought. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins BV, 361-384.

Nerlich, B., & Clarke, D. D. (2001). Serial metonymy: A study of reference-based polysemisation. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 2(2), 245-272.

Nerlich, B. and Clarke, D. D. (2002). Blending the past and the present: Conceptual and linguistic integration, 1800-2000. In: R. Dirven & R. Pörings (eds.), Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 555-593.

Image: Coffee cup at Nottingham railway station

Acknowledgement: The post is entirely written by me, but the conclusion benefited from a short discussion with Claude Sonnet 4.5 (and I learned the word ‘meet-cute’)