A literary analogue to the topic of this thread:—

A short story by James Thurber in his "My World & Welcome To It" (which also contains 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty') has a recollection of his old English teacher, 'Here Lies Miss Groby', who was obsessed with analysing literature for figures of speech.

"It is hard for me to believe," he comments, "that Miss Groby ever saw any famous work of literature from far enough away to know what it meant." She particularly loved metonymy, The Container For The Thing Contained... "I would find myself lying awake at night...star[ing] at the ceiling and try[ing] to think of an example of the Thing Contained For The Container. It struck me as odd that Miss Groby had never thought of that inversion, I finally hit on one... If a woman were to grab up a bottle of Grade A and say to her husband, 'Get away from me or I'll hit you with the milk', that would be a Thing Contained For The Container... I was eager and serious about it and it never occurred to me that the other children would laugh... When Miss Groby had quieted them she said to me rather coldly, 'That was not really amusing, James.' That's the kind of mixed-up thing that happened to me in my teens. In later years I came across another excellent example of this figure of speech in a joke long since familiar to people who know vaudeville or burlesque (or radio for that matter). It goes something like this:

    A: What's your head all bandaged up for?
    B: I got hit with some tomatoes.
    A: How could that bruise you up so bad?
    B: These tomatoes were in a can.

I wonder what Miss Groby would have thought of that one."