Re: Osama or Usama?

[Garrett Wollman <wollman>]

<<On Tue, 9 Oct 2001 01:04:18 -0400, Larry Weil <kc1ih@mediaone.net> said:

> And I find it odd that media outlets tend to use the name of the 
> capital city to mean, in effect, the country.

I don't.  It's a common-enough figure of speech that there's even a
specific name for it: metonymy.

The one that really gets my goat is reporters constantly saying things
like ``the capital city of Islamabad'' which is simply wrong:
Islamabad doesn't HAVE a capital city, it IS the capital city.  Could
the reporter not bear to shut his or her mouth for one lousy tenth of
a second?  (The correct phrasing would be ``the capital city,
Islamabad''.)

-GAWollman