My two daughters spent some time with Grandpa yesterday. When they got home the older one got me aside in the hallway and said that Grandpa had forgotten the younger sibling's name. She was concerned. Grandpa's mother faded into Alzheimer's for a decade and a half before she died, so my own stomach did a few flip flops as I listened. I asked her if he had been teasing, but she didn't think so. She thought he had really forgotten and was trying to cover it up by pretending to tease.
I called my Dad this morning and asked him how it went with the girls yesterday, careful not to use Sarah's name, waiting to see if he'd remember it on his own. Finally, I told him outright what Laura had told me the night before.
He just laughed and said, "I'm not that far gone yet!" He had been about five steps ahead of her, teasing her all along. Well, that being cleared up, I started to tell him about the new word I had just learned: synecdoche. This is one of those words that I come across every so often - I have no memory of ever even seeing it in print. When I punched it into MerriamWebster.com's dictionary and heard it pronounced, it was totally foreign. Like the true living dictionary that he is, Dad whipped out the definition off the top of his head. (You'll have to look it up yourself!)
Gee whiz! I should have known better than to doubt that man's ginormous mental database.
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That was in the introduction to a book I'm reading. The whole thing was written over my head in long, tangled sentences with numerous multi-syllabic words added where simpler ones would have done. It actually sounded rather affected, but at least I got one good word out of it!
ha, yeah. that word was thrown around a lot in IB English. a lot of people (including some teachers) were saying it like "sin-eck-DOH-che" until we found out it's really "sin-ECK-duh-kee"
I always get synecdoche and metonymy confused.
and rightly so.
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