Tag Archives: catachresis

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) andContinue reading “A Way With Words”