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This context come from the movie "Silence Of The Lambs" Spoilers!!!

"Crawford: Starling, Starling, we know who he is, and where he is. We're on our way right now.Johns Hopkins came up with some names. We fed him into Known Offenders. Subject's name is 'Jamie Gumb,' AKA 'John Grant.' Lecter's description was accurate, he just lied about the name. Listen to this. Customs had some paper on him. They stopped a carton two years ago at LAX - live caterpillars from Surinam. The addressee was a Jame Gumb."

"feed into" (McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs):

to put something into something; to push a supply of something into something.

E.g: Did you feed the data into the computer?

I think Crawford means that he put the name of the killer into the computer which has a program containing a record of "known offender" and the name matched the one in the record. In this case wouldn't "known offender" be a metonymy or some kind of inversion of metonymy?

Is my interpretation of the sense correct?

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  • Only 5 minutes earlier in the movie, someone says ...but there is no pattern, or the computers would have nailed it. Remember it's 1990's fiction - computers didn't actually "look" for modus operandi crime patterns back then. But it's pretty obvious from the perspective of the speaker, feeding [suspect names] into "known offenders" means getting someone in the [computer records] department to check if any of those suspects have criminal records. It's just loose vocabulary in a relatively tense spoken context, not exactly "creative / literary metonymy".
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Mar 26, 2023 at 1:12
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    I think it's a bit late to worry about 'spoilers' for The Silence of the Lambs, now 32 years old. In any case, a spoiler is the revelation of a vital plot ingredient or ending, e.g. 'Bambi's mom gets shot', not merely the reproduction of a bit of dialogue.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Mar 27, 2023 at 13:03

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It is a database which is stored on a computer. It would be common to name a database this way. And it would be an informal expression by a cop (who isn't a computer technician). He doesn't know how databases really work, he knows there is a box downtown and you type information into the box and a a little printer prints out a list of names. He calls the box which holds the database of known offenders, "Known Offenders".

From context, he didn't actually feed the name, but the rest of the description that Lecter had given (as the name had been fake). The database allowed for a "fuzzy" search on characteristics such as height, age, race etc.

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  • Is this an example of a metonymy?
    – Static Bounce
    Commented Mar 27, 2023 at 12:56
  • Why tagging a user doesn't work for me anymore?
    – Static Bounce
    Commented Mar 27, 2023 at 13:07
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    Yes, but it's not a great example, as it may be as much the result of the cop's ignorance as of any deliberate figure of speech.
    – James K
    Commented Mar 27, 2023 at 17:42
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known offenders is a police and law enforcement term for people who have usually been convicted of a particular crime and are thus known to law enforcement.

In today's society, it means their name is in a database somewhere. The database would constitute a "list of known offenders", if you printed it out...

known offender You can read this page in the Collins Dictionaries which gives examples and defines both terms.

Example:

This was a known offender whose crimes were covered up. Times,Sunday Times

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