Thursday, March 25, 2010

Tel Aviv and AFP's Lousy Synedoche


Honest Reporting/Backspin
24 March '10

Synedoche is a figure of speech where a part is substituted for its whole. Common examples include:

"All hands on deck" ("all people on deck")
"Boots on the ground" ("soldiers on the ground")
"100 head of cattle" ("100 cows")
"The White House said . . ." ("The Executive Branch of the United States said . . .")

One common synedoche journalists and bloggers use is to refer to the capital city as the government of that country. You'd think the usage would be straightforward enough. Except when the city's not the capital.

Which brings us to AFP, which provides today's example of deliberately lousy usage:

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