Back in February, I’d come across a word—catachresis—in my American Heritage Dictionary. I forget what I had been looking for originally. Catatonic? Doesn’t matter. Catachresis means the “misapplication of a word or phrase” such as “the use of blatant to mean ‘flagrant’.”
Mary and I have been podcasting KPBS’s A Way With Words (AWWW) and so I called them to ask what on earth the difference could be. If you’re not familiar with AWWW, it’s sort of like Car Talk for word geeks. I got a call from AWWWs’ exec producer, Stefanie Levine, [...]
Recent Comments