Catachresis
A strained or paradoxical use of a word — deliberately, when it becomes striking; accidentally, when it becomes an error.
Catachresis, from the Greek 'katachresis' ('misuse'), names the use of a word in a way that stretches, mixes, or contradicts its ordinary meaning. It has two lives: as an error ('to mitigate against', 'the ceiling was pregnant with rain') and as a deliberate figure, where the writer pushes a word past its usual range to make the reader feel the strain.
Milton's 'blind mouths', in Lycidas, is the canonical literary example: mouths cannot be blind, and yet the pairing indicts the clergy more forcefully than any grammatical phrase could. Shakespeare, Donne, and Dickinson all use catachresis this way — as a controlled violation, where the strangeness of the pairing is the meaning.
In modern criticism, some theorists (notably Derrida and Spivak) extend catachresis to any concept forced to name something it was not built to name — 'nature', 'the self', 'the human' — arguing that all abstract language is catachrestic at the edges. For most editors, though, the useful sense is the older one: a deliberate, marked misuse that generates meaning.
Common mistake: writing catachresis by accident and hoping the reader mistakes it for style. The line between a bold figure and a mixed metaphor is drawn by whether the strangeness earns its keep. If the strain reveals something, it is catachresis; if it just calls attention to a slip, it is a mistake.
“Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold / A sheep-hook.”
Keep reading the glossary
A figure of speech that describes one thing as if it were another.
Deliberate exaggeration for effect — not meant to be taken literally.
A figure that pairs two contradictory terms in a single phrase — 'deafening silence', 'bittersweet'.
A figure in which a modifier is grammatically attached to the 'wrong' noun for expressive effect.