--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, t3rinity <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jstein@> wrote: > > > Oh, and you weren't "using the term as a > > synecdoche," either. Might want to look that > > up too. > > I looked it up, but I don't know if it was correct, 'cuz being too > lazy to read Angies whole post. Would Metonymy be a more > appropriate term?
"Carpet bombing" is a figure of speech, but it doesn't really fit the definitions of either synecdoche or metonymy. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche But the main problem is that it's an *inappropriate* figure of speech for the act of bombing oil wells. Carpet or saturation bombing is used to destroy military installations, supplies, and personnel, and to demoralize the population of an area. For oil wells, you have to do *targeted* bombing. But the U.S. wouldn't be bombing Iran's oil wells in the first place; we'd want to capture them, not destroy them. And finally, carpet bombing per se pretty much went out with the Vietnam War. Our bombing technology is so much more efficient now that carpet bombing--even in the appropriate situation--would be wasteful and inefficient. > > And "its" as a possessive never, EVER has an > > apostrophe. > > Judy, don't come down too hard down on her. This would be a > typical German thing to do. Angela, by her own account, has been teaching at high levels in the U.S. for many years and has repeatedly emphasized here how poor her students' English skills are. If she's in a position to make that kind of judgment, her own English skills ought to be above reproach. In German, possessives are written with > apostrophes. The problem in Germany right now is, that the English > usage has mixed through popular culture so much that both versions are > officially accepted now. >
