synecdochic

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syn·ec·do·che

(sĭ-nĕk′də-kē)

A figure of speech in which the name of a part is used to stand for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).

[Middle English synodoches, from Medieval Latin synodoche, alteration of Latin synecdochē, from Greek sunekdokhē, from sunekdekhesthai, to take on a share of : sun-, syn- + ekdekhesthai, to understand (ek-, out of; see eghs in Indo-European roots + dekhesthai, to take; see dek- in Indo-European roots).]

syn′ec·doch′ic (sĭn′ĕk-dŏk′ĭk), syn′ec·doch′i·cal (-ĭ-kəl) adj.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Adj.

synecdochic - using the name of a part for that of the whole or the whole for the part; or the special for the general or the general for the special; or the material for the thing made of it; "to use `hand' for `worker' or `ten sail' for `ten ships' or `steel' for `sword' is to use a synecdochic figure of speech"

synecdochical

figurative, nonliteral - (used of the meanings of words or text) not literal; using figures of speech; "figurative language"

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This account of "social justice" is synecdochic for the democratic socialist vision as a whole, however it names itself--progressivism, American liberalism, socialism.

Social Justice versus Western Justice

The important issue here is neither the richness of any particular tradition nor some criterion of relevance, representational accuracy, or authenticity inevitably anchored in an ultimately essentialist and/or self-evident concept of Jewishness; rather, the axiomatic premise to be challenged is precisely the synecdochic or metonymic logic supporting the assumption that the "Jewish" object matter of our scholarly work offers some kind of access to the historical presence of the Jewish populations that we Jewish studies professionals are really interested in anyway, and that therefore what we're all really doing is engaging in an (albeit multivalent) archival project overseen by the master-signifier of history.

A Polemical Confession

(3) Especially in the past two decades vampires have become "defanged"--not only in the sense in which Susannah Clements uses the term, applying it to the spiritual content of the vampire metaphor, but in a broader sense, which understands bite as a synecdochic expression of a metaphorical act.

Masculinity, Visibility, and the Vampire Literary Tradition in What We Do in the Shadows

Analogically speaking, once the Muslim rule in India was gone, did the figures like Shibli consider English with all its synecdochic associations a kind of a responsibility left by the "father" to be taken care of, a kind of a debt left by the predecessor that was to be undone?

Shibli, English, and the Step-Mother

Photographic media--particularly the still photograph as the synecdochic resolution of complexity--are intrinsic to this process.

Becoming Iconic

The synecdochic use of the fertile, fertilized uterus reduces women to not only their material reproductive potential, but also to a specific social role.

Fetal Positions: Fetal Visualization, Public Art, and Abortion Politics

Such arguments revolved around the synecdochic logic of part-representing-whole that governs "close reading," revealing its ability to scale from any amount of evidence (a word, a line, a sonnet) to any level of interpretation (the poem, poetry in the nineteenth century, poetic language in general).

Problems of scale in "Close" and "Distant" reading

This final scene scripts a potential disavowal of Lucius's attempt at ridding Rome of the synecdochic Moor on the audience's part.