Stop Synecdoches!

On 2025-12-29 1

Thus we are told that “the Russians” want to invade Ukraine, or even Europe, when this obsession seems to belong only to one man and his close associates. It is likely that “the Russians” mostly desire peace, prosperity, joy in life, and that they would be very happy to visit the rest of the world and peacefully welcome tourists rightly admiring Saint Petersburg or the Bolshoi. How beautiful peace would be between “the Russians” and the rest of the world!

We’re fed up with synecdoches!

We are told again and again that “the French” pay too many taxes. But which French people, and which taxes? The synecdoche hides a far more complex reality. From then on, we are left to swallow information that would deserve more precision. Like all synecdoches, those that reduce an entire people to its name are convenient and irreplaceable, but how many false ideas and clichés they carry!

The habit of summarizing government bodies by the place where they reside is common and convenient, but it hides the real author or authors of a decision taken by “the Élysée,” “the White House,” or “the Vatican.” Yet this is useful to know when elections come. And what about the mysterious “visitors of the night” who appear at the hidden doors of palaces? Clearly, synecdoches are convenient masks.

Equally vague, and sources of countless prejudices, are those that encompass a social group. “Young people” certainly designates the current generation, but this generalization blurs the differences, problems, behaviors, values and refusals of an entire age group, reduced to its birth years alone. Often the synecdoche does not have the same meaning depending on who uses it: “the wealthy neighborhoods,” for example, or “welfare dependency,” or “social laws”…

When we say “the street has spoken,” who exactly are we talking about? Who precisely made up “the yellow vests,” now turned into a fantasy? Also worrying are all “the networks,” that opaque and stateless web of social networks where so many interactions unfold on complex platforms that evade all control. Who organizes them?

Certainly, in the age of “instant news” and continuous information, synecdoches, by creating evocative images, allow us to grasp complex realities quickly with familiar terms. They express in a single word social, political, geopolitical entities, power dynamics… But this brevity risks concealing what every citizen of this globalized world has the right to know.

Yes, sometimes, we’ve had enough of misleading synecdoches!

Michel Seyrat.