When you try to describe or express any action, object, idea, whatever, you need a vocabulary. The more accurate, the more exact your description. You also take for granted that your addressee will be able to decode what you have expressed.

As a construction worker, whatever the language used at the working environment, I am required to name a number of objects and actions.

When you perform a task you also gain skills to name tools, objects, processes. You are supposed and required to make a perfect job. However you are supposed but not always required to name everything properly. Let?s see some examples.

It is not only because sometimes it is cold and rainy, there are many hours left to leave, that irony could be used. I might not get it, perhaps it is only for the need of a smile from time to time. A 20/100 nail is an electrode. Deixis, hyperbole and an out-of-place metaphor allow intelligibleness. It would always be informal speech as well. The kind you would never use when addressing to technical staff.

Synecdoche and metonymy are common figures that deviate from an accurate definition. You just compare and use the name of a tool or object when you are faced with another one that resembles it or functions in a similar way. Please, allow me to bring some examples that are better understood within a diachronic context for the metonymy: a bird?s claw became a part of a hammer; a ploughed versus that defined the area where the buildings were to be constructed became a line of the text where the founders of the city were prayed in Latin. Let?s come back to synchrony for the synecdoche: If you cannot name a particular element or object you just name the generic. So a round wire nail, an oval wire nail, a lost head nail, a brad or a tack are just nails.

All this is to say that many times it is difficult to find the exact terms. So you express yourself the best way you can just for the sake of being understood. Thus when I began to refer to the action of shuttering or formwork, I used casting as the more specific term I had at that time. I cannot blame it on cold and rainy weather, nor apply for a particular figure to explain a deictically restrictive use.

But I can point it out.