I always like Geoff Nunberg on NPR. Recently he talked about a common term used in the U.S. these days: "We're broke."

While a political party, which shall remain nameless, keeps saying that, indeed we are not. Geoff put it all into perspective for me. It's because of the pronoun "we" and a semantic operation called "metonymy." "Metonymy" means a word can jump from one thing to something else that is related. His example: When you say "We're parked out back," you don't mean you are your wife are parked back there; you mean the car is. Similarly, when our politicians argue about slashing social programs, their excuse is that "We're broke." Yet, it certainly doesn't mean that everyone is broke because we aren't.

Thoughts?

Metonymy is pretty common in the media when the name of a place is used as shorthand for an institution located there. For instance a news report might start "Downing Street has announced that..." where "Downing Street" refers to the British prime minister's office, located at 10 Downing Street. The US equivalent would presumably be to use "the White House" to refer to the President and his staff.

I hadn't really thought of "we're broke" as an example of metonymy. Wikipedia defines it as "a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept". I suppose using "we" to refer to the nation's finances qualifies under that definition.

Politicians are constantly using it to improperly frame issues by declaring, "The American (or British, French, Australian, etc.) people" bla-bla-bla, when in truth it is only they who possess their attitude.