Metonymy

This is an intellectual warming-up exercise for my proposed doctorate, discussing how the use of spreadsheets negatively affects the successful implementation of ERP programs. I literally woke up this morning thinking 'Excel', and then went over several points in my mind. The following material is probably written in an anecdotal style as opposed to an academic style, which means that this material probably won't find its way into the final product. 

 I first came across the word metonymy in David Lodge's excellent novel "Nice work". Here it is described as "substituting some attribute or cause or effect of the thing for the thing itself". Looking around on the Internet, I discover that two classical rhetoric terms, metonymy and synecdoche are almost the same thing, and at the moment I can't really distinguish between them. 

[I]t is often difficult to distinguish between metonymy and synecdoche. Plastic = credit card is a case of synecdoche because credit cards are made from plastic, but it is also metonymic because we use plastic to refer to the whole system of paying by means of a prearranged credit facility, not just the cards themselves. In fact, many scholars do not use synecdoche as a category or term at all." (Murray Knowles and Rosamund Moon, Introducing Metaphor. Routledge, 2006).

My examples of metonymy mainly come from the commercial world, in which a leading product comes to represent all the products in the same market

• Can you hoover the carpet?
• I'll just pop this cassette on my walkman
• Let me google that
• Send me some excels and I'll prepare an evaluation

Although this sort of thing doesn't happen so much in Israel, it certainly exists in the hi-tech world ("send me the excels"). I heard one lovely example of the television a few months ago during a news article discussing the affects of mobile phones on pre-teenagers: "What kind of Pelephone is your i-phone?".  Pelephone is a metonymy, as this was the name of the first mobile phone carrier in Israel (literally, miracle phone). Since then, more carriers have joined the market, but some people still refer to mobile phones in this manner.

I am sure that marketing managers would be very pleased when their product transcends the market and become the name for the market. Rowland Hanson was Microsoft's marketing manager in the early days, and he dictated that the product's name should be prefixed by "Microsoft" in order to enhance the Microsoft brand as opposed to the actual product name. His suggested name for Microsoft's spreadsheet program was 'Microsoft Plansheet', whereas other names considered were 'Number Buddy', 'Mr Spreadsheet' and 'Sigma'. 

Finally a district manager suggested Excel: Bingo!

Upon the program's release, Microsoft was promptly sued by Manufacturers Hanover Trust, which offered a computerised banking service under the same name. A settlement stipulated that use of the word was okay - as along as it was preceded by Microsoft. Rowland Hanson's revenge was complete.

(Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, "Gates" (1994), pp 276-7.

All of the above is a long-winded explanation of why I will probably use the specific product name "Excel" in the doctorate's title as opposed to the generic 'spreadsheet'. You mean that there are other spreadsheet programs (cue a blog about the history of computer spreadsheet programs)?