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, and we set up a talk with Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett the hosts of the show in early March.
My call (actually, they call you) aired on May 12, 2007. Here’s the link if you’re interested in knowing the difference between blatant and flagrant (about 25 minutes into the broadcast).