ABSTRACT
Metaphor has taken a position within the literature as representing all forms of figurative language. Thus, although the surface differences between metaphor and other tropes may have appeared small, these differences have become overwhelmed and obscured by metaphor's preeminence. Metonymy is a less familiar term than metaphor in the scholarship, though it is as common a persuasive device in speech and writing. As a rhetorical device, synecdoche and other forms of metonymy serve many functions not always open to metaphor's breadth of context. Metonymic images require audiences to make generalizations based on significant and concentrated details; we inductively reason the way from specific example to universalized conclusions. As science speedily moves to define the very essence of life in microscopic terms, we still struggle to "unite into one meaning" the profusion of detail we daily encounter.
