Look up catachresis in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Catachresis (from Greekκατάχρησις, "misuse"), originally meaning a semantic misuse or error—e.g., using "militate" for "mitigate", "chronic" for "severe", "travesty" for "tragedy", "anachronism" for "anomaly", "alibi" for "excuse", etc.—is also the name given to many different types of figures of speech in which a word or phrase is being applied in a way that significantly departs from conventional (or traditional) usage.[1]
Variant definitions
There are various characterizations of catachresis found in the literature.
Definition
Example
Crossing categorical boundaries with words, because there otherwise would be no suitable word.[2][3]
The sustainers of a chair being referred to as legs.
Replacing an expected word with another, half rhyming (or a partly sound-alike) word, with an entirely different meaning from what one would expect (cf malapropism, Spoonerism, aphasia).[4]
I'm ravished! for "I'm ravenous!" or for "I'm famished!" "They build a horse" instead of they build a house.
The strained use of an already existing word or phrase.[5]
Catachresis is often used to convey extreme emotion or alienation. It is prominent in baroque literature and, more recently, in dadaist and surrealist literature.[citation needed]
Use in philosophy and criticism
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.[9][citation needed]
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 people and are deemed improper[by whom?] thus denote a catachresis, a word with an arbitrary[clarification needed] connection to its meaning.[citation needed]
In Calvin Warren's Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,[10] catachresis refers to the ways Warren conceptualizes the figure of the black body as vessel or vehicle in which fantasy can be projected. Drawing primarily from the "Look a Negro" moment in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Chapter 5: "The Fact of Blackness",[11] Warren works from the notion that "the black body…provides form for a nothing that metaphysics works tirelessly to obliterate", in which "the black body as a vase provides form for the formlessness of nothingness. Catachresis creates a fantastic place for representation to situate the unrepresentable (i.e., blackness as nothingness).
^Max Black discusses this phenomenon at some length, designating them catachrestic substitution metaphors: Black, M., Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962).
^Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, 1977 [orig. 1821–1830]), p. 214.
^Pope, Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, x
^Clarification needed: the tradition of Sausserian linguistics in which Derrida works holds that the relation between all signifiers and their signifieds is an arbitrary one.