This is a guest post by Professor Gautam Borah; more information further down.

In our school days, our English teacher, a great lover of the language, would often cite the sentence, “The kettle is boiling,” to illustrate “the unique nature of English.” In the sentence, “the kettle” refers not the kettle, but to the water inside it. Apparently, a unique phenomenon indeed!

However, modern linguistics demonstrates that this is not an English-exclusive phenomenon; it is a cross-linguistic occurrence where a whole is used to refer to a part, or a part is used to refer to a whole.