[Previous entry: "Requiem for the Crescent City"] [Next entry: "Spain defies US on Venezuela deal"]

01/14/2006:

"The American god of words"

by Manuel Talens
...And now, once I have set the premises of my exposition I will centre on the name of a country that recently was the object of fierce debates in the cyber exchanges of a plurinacional forum of translation to which I belong. I am referring to The United States of America, alias America. Yes, the citizens of The United States call America their own country and, as a consequence, they call themselves “Americans”, despite the fact that America is a whole continent with more than thirty countries, big and small, that might claim the same right to this appellation. We are therefore facing a flagrant case of undue and unilateral appropriation of a common name, something that rhetorically speaking we might qualify as synecdoche or metonymy, that is, the transfer of meaning from a term that designates a whole to only one of its parts.
axisoflogic.com