Catachresis:
- : use of the wrong word for the context
- : use of a forced and especially paradoxical figure of speech (such as blind mouths) [Merriam-Webster]
I’ve been running across a lot of unfamiliar words of late, although this seems a specialist word for grammarians, and I’m definitely not a grammarian. The Merriam-Webster link also discusses grammarian usages of catachresis, mostly in what appears to be a snitly way. Noted in “Your existential terror is adorable,” Rachel Manteuffel, WaPo:
Slackmoji is essentially an adorable medium. You can, as my colleague Chloe Coleman has, choose a little cartoon frog as an avatar for yourself and illustrate your feelings that way. Perhaps you feel shame.
And while you admit you feel ashamed, you’ve also cutened it up for public consumption. It’s … processed. Indirect. Ironic. Visually catachrestic. It’s like poetry.
I recall castigating someone, in email, for using an emoji. This is back in the BBS days, where it was all ASCII, not the emoji-enabling UTF-8, and so it was nothing more than :). I told them it was lazy and would never last.
I was half-right. Yes, that’s shamelessly stolen from someone giving a speech concerning X Windows at one of the UNIX conferences a long time ago. Or maybe it was the commentary.
