This Google search brought a seeker to these pages: homeric simile about assholes.
Sorry. Homer don’t play that.
Related reading
All OCA simile posts (Pinboard)
[When a user is signed in to a Google account, the content of a Google search is hidden from all eyes but Google’s. Whoever was searching for similes was not signed in: that’s how I was able to see the search in my blog stats. If there were a Homeric simile about assholes, it would have to be about Agamemnon. But to call Agamemnon an asshole is to engage in metonymy or synecdoche, or both.]
Friday, July 11, 2014
Searching for a simile
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comments: 11
Oh, but now I'm wondering, are there some especially wonderful words Homer used to insult his characters?
(I should remember, but I don't... What comes to my mind instead are some of Catullus's colorful insults!)
Had to look up the word metonymy (thank you, Prof), and learned of another word which defines a specific kind of metonymy - synecdoche. I'm a novice at word games, but seems to me that referring to anyone as an asshole is to use (a?) synecdoche? (Is 'engage in synecdochery' the correct way to use that word in the example of your last sentence?)
One popular Homeric insult is dogface, suggesting greed. Dogs and bird eat the dead, the opening of the Iliad says.
Catullus: what’s the Latin for “playing the dozens”?
Yes, it’s synecdoche. I always lean to metonymy because the metaphor-metonymy contrast was a big thing when I was coming up in English studies. Some people consider synecdoche a separate trope; some consider it a form of metonymy. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics: “In 20th-c. attempts to reduce the very figures inherited from classical rhetoric to an intelligible order, one group of critics has followed Ramus and Vico, arguing that there are four basic tropes — metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Others, following Jakobson, have claimed that there are only two — metaphor and metonymy. In the latter classification, synecdoche is treated as a subclass of metonymy; in both, there is an evident connection, conceptual or physical, between the figurative word and what it designates, whereas no such connection exists in the case of metaphor.”
So yes, synecdoche is probably the better way to say it. You could say “using synecdoche” or “relying on synecdoche,” or “an example of synecdoche,“ anything like that.
I just revised this post accordingly. Thanks for making me think more carefully about these things.
You just passed my "Good Teacher" test: I learned something new and was made to feel a little bit smarter for asking.
Now, the real test: will my aging brain retain most of what you've taught me - and, for how long?
The question also is whether I’ll remember to get it right the next time – I’ve made this mistake before. Someday I’ll get it right.
This conversation got too smart for my comment, but here it is anyway: In a Yeats seminar--I think we were discussing "A Stick of Incense" or maybe one of the Crazy Jane poems--Dave Miller told us a story about working on a construction crew: guys were swapping jokes and jibes, and the foreman said, "Miller, you're uglier than a bucket full of assholes." It's not a simile, but almost 30 years later, it's probably still my favorite insult.
!!
That’s unforgettable, as I suppose his recounting the story demonstrates.
metonymy
something quite like unto its self in some thing's other way
which substitutes that thing on the shelf of a word with an urge to play...
synecdoche
a donkey gap is an ass hole too as a homer is baseball's run,
so ponder on these silly things just for a little fun...
Thanks, Anon. I enjoyed that and hope other readers do too.
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