Maybe this is a follow-up from yesterday, the true story of the street preachers and the street theater protestors yelling at each other in Berkeley in 1974.

There is a cousin to metaphor and simile, a type of figurative language called synecdoche. It's a fast way of indicating something big by mentioning only a part of the thing. When it's done well, the reader gets the big picture from the little piece.

"The hand that signed the paper felled the city." Well, of course it didn't really. The tyrant signed the order, the army he had assembled over the years carried out the order, but in context the sweeping power of the tyrant leaps out of the synecdoche. The part brings to mind the whole.

It has seemed to me that synecdoche is the key to empathy and ethics. At some point in life a person realizes, "I don't really know what the other person has suffered. Try as I might, I can't really walk a mile in another person's shoes." Once you know that you only partially understand what another person has gone through, you can practice empathy and try to imagine the unseen part. From the part you can look for the whole. A person begins to see it as an ethical obligation to try.

But it's really good to add the insight that synecdoche may imply: you only have partial knowledge. It says to me: I should be modest in my claims about the suffering of others because I only see the part, not the whole. My knowledge is not going to get larger than that. I should speak moderately when it has become clear to me that my knowledge is incomplete. And to the degree that knowledge of my fellow humans always resembles synecdoche, it is always incomplete.

And "And yet" will surely follow. A discussion of times one must speak boldly....