A rhetorical term indicating a misuse, deliberate or not, of a figure of speech.
As, for example, the use of
blatant to mean
flagrant.
Or, as in MacArthur's farewell address, "I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears" (ears cannot be thirsty).
This
rhetorical term has been employed by
Michel Foucault as exemplary of one of the modes of development of writing, from
synecdoche to
metonymy to
catachresis (or
metaphor), the first two being examples of a substition of a "subject in lieu of the whole" and "a notable circumstance", whereas catachresis is a more figurative form of substition. Thus, catachresis represents for Foucault one of the important concepts of not only what writing is, but what it can be, because in this trope we have a
linguistic displacement by which some
order of things can be altered, or subverted.
See also
Gayatri Spivak who catechretically refers to
postcolonialism by use of this term.
At question for both of these writers is the standard
interpretation of
language that resists
figurative speech (see
Thomas Sprat on rhetoric), signified by
Webster 1913 by the derisive term
wrongly in the
definition offered below.