Catachresis

Catachresis (from Greek κατάχρησις, "abuse"), originally meaning a semantic misuse or errorâ€"e.g., using "militate" for "mitigate", "decimate" for "devastate", "our mutual friend" for "our friend in common", "chronic" for "severe", "anachronism" for "anomaly", "alibi" for "excuse", etc.â€"is also the name given to many different types of figure of speech in which a word or phrase is being applied in a way that significantly departs from conventional (or traditional) usage.

Classification

There are various different subdefinitions of catachresis.

Examples

Dead people in a graveyard being referred to as inhabitants is an example of catachresis.

Classification in literature

Catachresis is often used to convey extreme emotion or alienation. It is prominent in baroque literature and, more recently, in dadaist and surrealist literature.

Example from Alexander Pope's Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry:

Masters of this [Catachresis] will say,

Mow the beard,

Shave the grass,

Pin the plank,

Nail my sleeve.

Derrida, Spivak

In Jacques Derrida's ideas of deconstruction, catachresis refers to the original incompleteness that is a part of all systems of meaning. He proposes that metaphor and catachresis are tropes that ground philosophical discourse. Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak applies this word to "master words" that claim to represent a group, e.g., women or the proletariat, when there are no "true" examples of "woman" or "proletarian". In a similar way, words that are imposed upon a people and are deemed improper thus denote a catachresis, a word with an arbitrary connection to its meaning.

See also

• Cacography
• Doublespeak
• Figure of speech
• Malapropism
• Rhetoric

Notes

References

• Ghiazza, Silvana (2007). Le figure retoriche. Bologna: Zanichelli. p. 350. ISBN 978-88-08-16742-2. 
• Morton, Stephen (2003). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London: Routledge. p. 176. ISBN 0-415-22934-0. 
• Smyth, Herbert Weir (1920). Greek Grammar. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. p. 677. ISBN 0-674-36250-0. 

External links

• The dictionary definition of catachresis at Wiktionary