The brass got a new set of wheels

In his “On Langauge” coulmn on Sunday, William Safire defined two kinds of metaphor that could be confused:

Metonymy … identifies a person or thing by something closely associated with it — like “the brass” for high military officers, “the crown” for royalty and “the suits” for executives, usually male, and other stiffs in traditional business garb. “Metonymy is not to be confused with synecdoche,” I wrote in a display of trope-a-dope, “which is pronounced correctly only in Schenectady and uses the part to refer to the whole” like “wheels” for automobiles and “head” for cattle.

His full column this week is about synecdoche, the correct definition of headwind and a few funny plays on words.