Go Ahead. Make My Amendment.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 05:41PM
Figaro

I’ve looked down
barrels of guns
.

Rep. Bart Stupack (D-MI), when asked if death threats concerned him, in Politico.

metonymy (meh-TON-y-my), the scale-changing figure.  From the Greek, meaning “name change.”

Jeez, calm down, people. It’s a health care bill, for crying out loud. A deflated, tweaked, compromised, new abortion-free formula health care bill, not the apocalypse. Yet the increasingly misnamed Tea Partiers have been calling in death threats and calling for revolution.

Bart Stupack, the anti-abortion holdout who switched sides at the last minute, shrugs rhetorically with a commonplace metonymy. The trope takes an aspect of something and makes it stand for the whole thing. (See other examples here and here and here.) Stupack, an ex-cop, could simply have said, “I’ve had bad guys point guns at me.” Instead, he makes a gun appear before our very eyes. The Greeks called this kind of immediacy enargeia. It’s the special effects of rhetoric.

If only it could make those Tea Totalitarians disappear.

Article originally appeared on Figures of Speech (http://inpraiseofargument.com/).
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