This is an extract taken from David Lodge’s Nice Work. It records a conversation between Robyn Penrose and Vic Wilcox about the hidden messages in cigarette’s ads. Robyn Penrose is a temporary lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge so she is used to analyze the link between signifier and significant. When she saw a huge poster on roadside hoardings which depicted a brand of cigarettes called “Silk Cut”, she started to decode it. According to this she discovered a metaphor hidden behind the advertisement. The poster was made by a purple silk in which there was a single slit and there weren’t any words on it except for the Government Health Warning about smoking. Robyn associated the image to the female body and the cut on it symbolized a vagina so that advert increased the impulse of penetrate the female body. Wilcox didn’t agree Robyn’s analysis because she must have had a twisted mind to see all that in his own opinion. This type of analysis doesn’t come from a dirty mind but it comes from semiotic: the study of sign. The word “Cut” reminds the way the tobacco leaf is cut while the word “silk” is something that isn’t linked to tobacco so this is a metaphor that reminds something like “smooth as silk”. The conversation shifted to the cigarette’s brand smoked by Wilcox: Marlboro. The brand contains a metonymic message that is the connection between smoking them and the healthy, heroic, outdoor or the solitarian life of the cowboy. The aim of the text is to entertain the reader and at the same time to  explicit the different  function between metaphor and metonymy in communication. Thanks to the examples of cigarette’s brands, Robyn Penrose has explained that metaphor is a figure of speech based on similarity while metonymy is based on contiguity.