Catachresis
Catachresis (from Greek κατάχρησις, "abuse"), originally meaning a semantic misuse or error—e.g., using "militate" for "mitigate", "chronic" for "severe", "travesty" for "tragedy", "anachronism" for "anomaly", "alibi" for "excuse", etc.—is also the name given to many different types of figures of speech in which a word or phrase is being applied in a way that significantly departs from conventional (or traditional) usage.[1]
Variant definitions
There are various characterizations of catachresis found in the literature.
Definition | Example |
---|---|
Crossing categorical boundaries with words, because there otherwise would be no suitable word.[2][3] | The sustainers of a chair being referred to as legs. |
Replacing an expected word with another, half rhyming (or a partly sound-alike) word, with an entirely different meaning from what one would expect (cf malapropism, Spoonerism, aphasia).[4] |
I'm ravished! for "I'm ravenous!" or for "I'm famished!" "They build a horse" instead of they build a house. |
The strained use of an already existing word or phrase.[5] | "Tis deepest winter in Lord Timon's purse" – Shakespeare, Timon of Athens
|
The replacement of a word with a more ambiguous synonym (cf euphemism).[6] | Saying job-seeker instead of "unemployed". |
Examples
Dead people in a graveyard being referred to as inhabitants is an example of catachresis.[7]
Example from Alexander Pope's Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry:
Masters of this [catachresis] will say,
- Mow the beard,
- Shave the grass,
- Pin the plank,
- Nail my sleeve.[8]
Use in literature
Catachresis is often used to convey extreme emotion or alienation. It is prominent in baroque literature and, more recently, in dadaist and surrealist literature.[citation needed]
Use in philosophy and criticism
In Jacques Derrida's ideas of deconstruction, catachresis refers to the original incompleteness that is a part of all systems of meaning. He proposes that metaphor and catachresis are tropes that ground philosophical discourse.[9][citation needed]
In Calvin Warren's Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation,[10] catachresis refers to the ways Warren conceptualizes the figure of the black body as vessel or vehicle in which fantasy can be projected. Drawing primarily from the "Look a Negro" moment in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, Chapter 5: "The Fact of Blackness",[11] Warren works from the notion that "the black body…provides form for a nothing that metaphysics works tirelessly to obliterate", in which "the black body as a vase provides form for the formlessness of nothingness. Catachresis creates a fantastic place for representation to situate the unrepresentable (i.e., blackness as nothingness).
In the 20th century, other philosophers embraced the view that
See also
Reading
- Ghiazza, Silvana (2007). Le figure retoriche. Bologna: Zanichelli. p. 350. ISBN 978-88-08-16742-2.
- Morton, Stephen (2003). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London: Routledge. pp. 176. ISBN 0-415-22934-0.
- Smyth, Herbert Weir (1920). Greek Grammar. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 677. ISBN 0-674-36250-0.
References
- ISBN 978-1-105-99521-7.
- ^ Max Black discusses this phenomenon at some length, designating them catachrestic substitution metaphors: Black, M., Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962).
- ^ Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, 1977 [orig. 1821–1830]), p. 214.
- ^ "Henry Peachum., The Garden of Eloquence (1593): Tropes, part Tropes, Catachresis". Perseus.tufts.edu. Retrieved 13 May 2013.
- ISBN 978-0-8018-9961-4.
- ISBN 978-0-8476-8674-2.
- ISBN 978-0-8232-3178-2.
- ^ Pope, Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, x
- ^ Clarification needed: the tradition of Sausserian linguistics in which Derrida works holds that the relation between all signifiers and their signifieds is an arbitrary one.
- ISBN 978-0-8223-7087-1.
- ^ Frantz Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness," in: his Black Skin, White Masks, c. 5.
- ^ Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers Shook, John. 2005 p. 2451 Biography of Colin Murray Turbayne on Google Books
- ^ Murphy, Jeffrie G. "Berkeley and the Metaphor of Mental Substance." Ratio 7 (1965):176.
- ^ JSTOR 25000234.
- ^ Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers Shook, John. 2005 p. 2451 Biography of Colin Murray Turbayne on Google Books
- ^ The University of Rochester Department of Philosophy- Berkley Essay Prize Competition - History of the Prize Colin Turbayne's The Myth of Metaphor on rochester.edu
- ^ The University of Rochester Department of Philosophy- Berkley Essay Prize Competition - History of the Prize Colin Turbayne's The Myth of Metaphor on rochester.edu