Rock and roll rhetoric: Lions
Red sun going down, way over dirty town
Starlings they’re sweeping around, crazy shoals
Yes and a girl is there, high heeling out across the square
The wind, it blows around in her hair and the flags upon the poles
“High heeling out across the square”, not walking or striding in high heels, but high-heeling. Like “all hands on deck” or the “face that launched a thousand ships” it’s using part of something (high heels) to refer to the whole (girl).
The formal term is synecdoche which closely related to metonymy; and, thanks to Mark Forsyth’s essential The Elements of Eloquence, I can confidently say the difference is this:
- In metonymy, the two things are physically connected: the White House, Downing Street, Redcoats, the pen which is mightier than the sword.
- In synecdoche, a narrower subset of metonymy, the representative is an actual body part: face, hands, feet, (high) heels.
It’s a very word-efficient way to produce a powerful image; perfect for songwriters. And copywriters.
Here are three versions from 1978, 1979 and 1980. It’s interesting to see how the band grows in confidence between what must have been one of their first ever TV appearances to the five-piece, third album line-up of 1980.
Lions was the closing track on Dire Straits’ 1978 debut.
Rock and roll rhetoric, the story so far
- Rock’n’Roll Suicide, featuring personification and alliteration.
- School’s Out, featuring paronomasia and irony
- Werewolves of London, with assonance
- White Room, featuring asyndeton
- Sunday Bloody Sunday, and some diacope
- Make me Smile (Come Up and See Me), with … caesura
- How Does It Feel?, featuring epizeuxis
- Searching for a Heart, with simile and isocolon
- If I Should Fall Behind, periodic sentences
- Even the Losers, featuring beautiful enargia
- Lions, and metonymy
