Quote:
Originally Posted by Jens
I don't see why that follows. It is common to use some part of the body, even a non-existent one, as a metaphor for the entire body. Examples that comes to mind are "many mouths to feed" and "a head count". Even today it's OK to use "souls" metaphorically to mean people.
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Yes: using a part to stand for the whole (or the whole to stand for a part) is a common enough rhetorical device, called
synecdoche.
I don't know if it's a local usage or not, but in my part of the world we'd commonly say "there wasn't a soul around" or "I couldn't see a soul" to mean "I was on my own". Thinking about it for the first time, I feel that the word "soul" slightly colours the sense of the phrases: we'd use them not just when there was no other person around, but when that absence of others induced a sense of loneliness or isolation.
Grant Hutchison