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Now this is an interesting Saturday morning. I haven't seen some of these examples trotted out since I taught Greek rhetoric 25 years ago. One of the most interesting bits of this discussion is how closely it corresponds to the points Al Snell is making in the parallel 'four years ago . . .' thread. Historically, and to the extent that we understand it as a purely rhetorical device, synecdoche was intended to shape the *perception* of the whole by the characteristics of the part, or, very occasionally, vice versa. That interpretation is a reasonable inference from Isocrates' explanation in the earliest discussion which we have of this rhetorical device. That usage would seem to correspond to what I read as Simon's suspicion that some would like to shape the perception of the whole of their 'greater XML' by the perceived virtues of a much smaller core (or perhaps shape the perception of their particular parts of XML by the virtues of what was once a much pithier whole). Unfortunately for our discussion (and remarkably parallel to it), Aristotle, the father of object-oriented thinking, weighed in on this rhetorical device early on, and his interpretation of the transference which Len's examples illustrate has been the accepted orthodoxy ever since. It is significant that Aristotle did not use the word 'metonymy', which as simple Greek would have meant no more than 'calling something by a different name', and which would have restricted his point about transference to purely lexical relationships. Aristotle used (in fact, coined in this sense) the much broader term 'metaphor', our understanding of which in this usage is fundamentally dependent upon the Aristotelian taxonomy of genus and species. That is, metaphor in the Aristotelian sense--which subsumes synecdoche, previously understood as a purely rhetorical device--is specifically about the inheritance of properties by species from genus; about the structural similarity of a genus and its species, and the extent to which the differences can be described by the presence or absence of attributes; and about the relationships of taxonomic siblings based on a fundamental structural identity. So now we verbose types are left to defend the purely rhetorical against the all-embracing taxonomic explanation. The word 'rhetoric' is rooted in the term for a public performer of poetry. Most simply understood, rhetorical devices are about the actual mechanics of performance--the syntax, if you will, of the instance. Clearly there are those of us who find it useful to understand the processing of an XML instance in just those same simple terms. And, like Aristotle, there are others who see first nodes nd properties. The debate is not a new one. Respectfully, Walter Perry
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