We read in the ARA This headline: "Black Thursday on World Stock Exchanges." It refers, of course, to the fact that the notorious US president is shaking up the stock market with his all-you-can-eat attitude toward the world. The stock exchanges are the stock market. We all understand that, just as when we say "the papers" we understand that we mean newspapers.
The literary device we use when we say it like this is synecdoche. That is: the figure of speech that consists of taking the part for the whole (or the whole for the part). When we were students, the example they gave us to help us remember it was "asking for someone's hand," referring not to asking for their hand, but for the entire body of the person in question, in marriage.
We don't ask for anyone's hand in marriage now, nor do we (much) read on paper. The stock market may be made of parquet flooring, but not the synthetic kind that became fashionable when we adapted everything natural to the artificial. Skin that became plastic, bricks that became brick wallpaper, fireplaces that became televisions, or wood that became parquet flooring. Today, there are stone tiles that imitate natural wood. You can hear them in some bars, and they look exactly like the real thing. They use them instead of wood because they're cheaper and easier to clean. They make no sense, but plastic or rubber parquet that tries to imitate wood doesn't make any sense either. I'm sure that the parquet flooring on the stock exchange isn't the kind you can install yourself with the "click-clack" system, as they call it, but rather a good parquet floor made of natural wood. That's why, when talking about stock market news, if I wanted to use that playful image (it always amuses me when I come across it), I would say "the fine parquet" or "the floating floor."
