Say What? Synecdoche

Catherine Keener and Philip Seymour Hoffman debate the pronunciation of synecdoche.

Synecdoche, NY, the directorial debut of previously write-only Charlie Kaufman, opens at Cannes today. So before we can even think about whether it’s any good, it would help if we could learn to pronounce the gosh darn title.

For starters, here is a lengthy, detailed synopsis from IMDB:

Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is mounting a new play. Fresh off of a successful production of Death of a Salesman, he has traded in the suburban blue-hairs and regional theater of Schenectady for the cultured audiences and bright footlights of Broadway. Armed with a MacArthur grant and determined to create a piece of brutal realism and honesty, something into which he can put his whole self, he gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in Manhattan’s theater district. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a small mockup of the city outside. As the city inside the warehouse grows, Caden’s own life veers wildly off the tracks. The shadow of his ex-wife Adele (Catherine Keener), a celebrated painter who left him years ago for Germany’s art scene, sneers at him from every corner. Somewhere in Berlin, his daughter Olive is growing up under the questionable guidance of Adele’s friend, Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh). He’s helplessly driving his marriage to actress Claire (Michelle Williams) into the ground. Sammy Barnathan (Tom Noonan), the actor Caden has hired to play himself within the play, is a bit too perfect for the part, and is making it difficult for Caden to revive his relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Samantha Morton). Meanwhile, his therapist, Madeline Gravis (Hope Davis), is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. His is second daughter, Ariel, is retarded. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one. As the years rapidly pass, Caden buries himself deeper into his masterpiece. Populating the cast and crew with doppelgangers, he steadily blurs the line between the world of the play and that of his own deteriorating reality. As he pushes the limits of his relationships, both personally and professionally, a change in creative direction arrives in Millicent Weems, a celebrated theater actress who may offer Caden the break he needs. By seamlessly blending together subjective point-of-views with traditional narrative structures, writer/director Charlie Kaufman has created a world of superbly unsteady footing. His richly developed cast of characters flutter between moments of warm intimacy and frightful insecurity, creating a script that brings to life all the complex and beautiful nuances of shared life and artistic creation. Synecdoche, New York is as its definition states: a part of the whole or the whole used for the part, the general for the specific, the specific for the general.

I put in the whole thing because it’s Charlie Kaufman, he’s great, and deserves the space. Also, if you’re thinking about the synecdoche pronunciation, there’s a big hint in there.

Now let’s take a look at the dictionary definiton from Merriam Webster:

Main Entry:

syn·ec·do·che 

Pronunciation:

\s?-?nek-d?-(?)k?\

Function:

noun

Etymology:

Latin, from Greek synekdoch?, from syn- + ekdoch? sense, interpretation, from ekdechesthai to receive, understand, from ex from + dechesthai to receive; akin to Greek dokein to seem good — more at ex-, decent

Date:

15th century

: a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (as fifty sail for fifty ships), the whole for a part (as society for high society), the species for the genus (as cutthroat for assassin), the genus for the species (as a creature for a man), or the name of the material for the thing made (as boards for stage)

Want to hear the pronunciation? Listen to the M-W link audio for its pronunciation.

Got it? And did you figure out the hint in the synopsis? Yup, it’s that synecdoche sounds an awful lot like Schenectady. Of course, if you don’t know anything about pronouncing names of mid-sized towns in upstate New York, that hint is no help whatsoever, but if you do, well, you always knew it would come in handy someday, didn’t you?

None of this has anything to do with whether the movie is any good or not. My expectations are high, though–perhaps perilously high. I’m a big fan of Kaufman’s previous work (I rate Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as one of the best movies of the 2000s) and even though this is his first spin as a director, he’s got a great cast (including theater directing pro Hoffman) to help him through and make things look good. I’m hoping for the best (oh, and the film could use a distributor. That would help.).