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Mercer: Learning a new word in search for a history

PIERRE -- Synecdoche. Didn't have a clue about definition. Or pronunciation. Never typed it until the other morning. Just wasn't something I had ever heard a sixth-grader say. That's the level newspaper writing strives to reach. (And rightly so.)...

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PIERRE - Synecdoche.

Didn't have a clue about definition. Or pronunciation. Never typed it until the other morning.

Just wasn't something I had ever heard a sixth-grader say. That's the level newspaper writing strives to reach. (And rightly so.)

The Internet dictionary said synecdoche is a noun: "A figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in Cleveland won by six runs (meaning 'Cleveland's baseball team')."

Next to the word was a loudspeaker symbol. Clicked and learned it's pronounced "seh neck duh kee" or something close.

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I ran across the word in "Daschle vs. Thune" that Jon Lauck published in 2007 through University of Oklahoma Press.

He wrote the book about the 2004 U.S. Senate race when Republican challenger John Thune defeated Democratic incumbent Tom Daschle.

Currently Jon is an adjunct professor of history and political science for the University of South Dakota who lives in Sioux Falls. In 2004 he worked for Thune's campaign.

I came upon the word in chapter 10, titled "Daschle Versus Thune as Synecdoche."

Stumped? I was, until I looked it up.

I arrived at the stumping through an invitation from Jon.

He asked five of us to discuss 1980s South Dakota politics during the annual conference held by the Center for Western Studies at Augustana University in Sioux Falls.

Sean Flynn, a professor of history and political science at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, spoke about the 1980 U.S. Senate election where Republican challenger Jim Abdnor defeated Democratic incumbent George McGovern.

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Catherine McNichol Stock, an associate professor of history at Connecticut College in New London, Conn., focused on a guest column about South Dakota written by Josh Davis for The New York Times.

Marshall Damgaard, who teaches political science and is a consultant for the Gov. William Janklow Papers collection at USD, talked about five points, including how close elections became for decades.

Drey Samuelson, the career-long chief of staff for retired U.S. Sen. Tim Johnson, recalled the story of Johnson's first win in the 1986 Democratic primary for U.S. House of Representatives and the subsequent win that November over Republican Dale Bell.

I spoke about the numerical decline of Democratic voters from 1986 to 2016, and the rocketing rise in independent registrations during the same period.

I also talked about Daschle's use of "get out the vote" to defeat Republican incumbent Abdnor in 1986, Johnson's use of GOTV to defeat Republican incumbent Larry Pressler for the U.S. Senate in 1996, and Thune's use of GOTV to neutralize Daschle in 2004.

I also drew on a broader theme from 1980s South Dakota: People's grasping for ways out of the farm crisis, such as the 1986 vote approving a state lottery and the 1988 vote for Deadwood gambling.

As I formed these thoughts the other morning, I found some newspapers I saved bearing my stories from decades past. They reminded me this ride has been remarkable. It's not done yet.

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