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Comment by dmm | Hacker News Reader

> a shiny, unused bullet fell out of the front pocket.

I'm assuming here that the author is refering to what is more accurately known as a cartridge. A bullet is the projectile, a hunk of lead, possibly with a jacket of copper or steel covering it. A cartridge is a bullet, a case, a primer and propellent. It's very easy to leave a catridge in a pocket and not notice it.

Is there an english word for the practice of commonly refering to an entity by a subset of that entity?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche is probably the term, although the context in which "synecdoche" is used is generally analysis of literature / "English class."

> Is there an english word for the practice of commonly refering to an entity by a subset of that entity?

A metonymy.

[edit: swolchok is right, it's a synecdoche]

Not quite. Metonymy is calling something by the name of a related object. The most common use of metonymy is probably "the White House" for President Obama's (Bush's, Clinton's, etc.) administration. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy

...what is more accurate know as a...

Must be contagious.

Ha, good catch. I seem to make similar mistakes fairly often, mostly leaving suffixes off of words: s, ly, etc. It makes proofreading a requirement for anything important. I never seem to do it while speaking though.

Maybe it has something to do with typing, like I've memorized the patterns of keypresses associated with certain words and attaching a suffix requires intervention at some level.

BTW, it's not common to use "bullet" to refer to a cartridge. While nobody usually uses "cartridge", most common term is "round".

It's quite common amongst folks who don't use guns.

If you've studied this matter extensively I'll concede the point but for what it's worth I hear people (mostly those unfamiliar with guns) refer to a cartridge as a bullet regularly.

> While nobody usually uses "cartridge"

The must be hyperbole. I have heard people use the word cartridge and I have used it before. Do you have any basis for that statement?

Just what I hear, people usually say something like this: "I just bought 300 rounds of 9mm for really good price at Walmart".

I suspect people who tend to buy 300 rounds of ammunition at Walmart know more than average about gun terminology.

Most of the population's knowledge comes from 24 and TV news reporters.

Yeah, but there you are only considering the limited subset of the population that actually owns a gun and buys rounds for it. Although the author of the post is American and I am not, which makes the likelihood of him knowing the difference bigger, I am pretty sure most of the people I know have no idea what the difference is between a bullet and a cartridge (fortunately there is Wikipedia).

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