I am working with a group of 15 yr olds, trying to help them identify literary devices in popular music (which is harder than I thought, with these artists that just go "ooohhh... " etc).
Anyway, what would you call this phrase: "...and my heart is hurting."
-metaphor
-synecdoche
-metonymy
....?
I'm guessing a sort of combination of synecdoche & metonymy?
Thanks.
i just looked up synecdoche andd i realised i don't even understand what the difference between a synecdosomething and a metonimy is.
i am not representative of this branch tho. you'll get your answer.
I also had to look up synecdoche. I did know about pars pro toto and totum* pro parte, which are apparently subclasses of synecdoches.
A metonymy (' "crown" in "lands belonging to the crown" ', says M-W) is quite close to a pars pro toto (a part for the whole: "England" for UK), but differs in that a pars pro toto uses a part of something to refer to the whole, whereas a metonymy uses one thing to refer to an associated thing (not necessarily part or whole of the same thing). Does that make sense?
But I don't know the answer to your question, OP. Does it have to be a figure of speech? I mean, can it not be literal?
*I'm quite sure I learned that as "totem", but googling it just now to find some good examples, it only turns up Indonesian and Dutch pages. Weird.
Well, unless she's having a physical heart attack, I don't think I could say it's literal! (It's from the Alicia Keys song "No One.")
Maybe just a simple metaphor: Comparing her despair to the pain she would feel if her heart was physically hurting? Or maybe I'll just skip that one!
"heart" as "emotional state" I would say is a metaphor, although one that's frozen into the language. I think "hurting" then is literal, or pretty close to it. I don't think this is a very educative example. If you get into etymology, a lot of literal things are metaphorical originally. "Sad" was originally "heavy" for example; cf. obsolete "sadiron". "Heart" isn't far from that.
Given that many people in sorrow, grief or distress feel a literal tightness in the chest, this barely even qualifies as "metaphor." I agree with those who say, in effect, that you should use much clearer-cut examples to demonstrate the meaning of the terms.
