catachreses

Its plural is catachreses, its adjectival forms catachrestic and catachrestical.

Catachresis and the amusing, awful and artificial cathedral 2009

Eric Partridge, in Usage and Abusage, sticks to the narrow definition (‘a word misused’) and cites two examples (anachronism for anomaly, to subject for to subordinate) before writing that because his book deals with the commonest catachreses in the language, a lengthy entry on catachresis per se is unnecessary.

Catachresis and the amusing, awful and artificial cathedral 2009

Reading happens in this continual absence of comprehension: instead, dense knots of delightfully paradoxical propositions and stupefying catachreses drive the reader on in the unconditional acceptance of the text that pierces, like a look that is too direct, the indeterminate prose, and makes all relations, and especially our relationship to time, absolutely precarious

/ubu Editions, Third Series: 12 New Titles : Kenneth Goldsmith : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation 2007

· · · WHAT habitual theatre or opera-goer has not been tempted a thousand times to laugh outright, and quite in the wrong place, at the incongruities, the inconsistencies, the mental and physical _catachreses_ of the stage, which defy illusion and destroy all vraisemblance?

The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 Volume 23, Number 2 Various

Therefore catachreses and hyperboles have found their place amongst them; not that they were to be avoided, but to be used judiciously, and placed in poetry, as heightenings and shadows are in painting, to make the figure bolder, and cause it to stand off to sight.

The works of John Dryden, $c now first collected in eighteen volumes. $p Volume 05 John Dryden 1665

 metaphoric strategies, for it constructs its narrative maps not from the schemata of the commonplace but out of endlessly inventive and open-ended analogies, catachreses, paradigm-elisions, puns, conceits: out of dream echoes or deformations and satirical distortions of the quotidian, and scientific or pseudo-scientific diagrams of the inaccessible: the new signifiers of sf's novel paradigm sets;

"Mimetic Fiction" 2009

To make room for the new material, Paul Beale has left out a considerable number of solecisms and catachreses, illiteracies, or phrases couched in a grammar inconsistent with that of Standard English, and malapropisms.

VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XI No 1 1984