As a pendant to the last post (“Imperfect Learning”), this one will emphasize the failure of thought involved in the error called CATACHRESIS, a term usually reserved for rhetoric rather than grammar. Thus the one-volume American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language gives an abbreviated definition, as follows: 1. The misapplication of a word or phrase, as the use of blatant to mean “flagrant.” 2. The use of a strained figure of speech, such as a mixed metaphor.
A much more informative definition is displayed in that nonpareil multivolume lexicographic source, The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (vol. 1, p. 853): 1. In rhet.: (a) A figure by which a word is used to designate an object, idea, or act to which it can be applied only by an exceptional or undue extension of its proper sphere of meaning: as, to stone (pelt) a person with bricks; a palatable tone; to display one’s horsemanship in riding a mule; to drink from a horn of ivory. Catachresis differs from metaphor in that it does not replace one word with another properly belonging to a different act or object, but extends the use of a word in order to apply it to something for which the language supplies no separate word. (b) A violent or inconsistent metaphor: as, to bend the knee of one’s heart; to take arms against a sea of troubles. (c) In general, a violent or forced use of a word.––. In philol., the employment of a word under a false form through misapprehension in regard to its origin: thus, causeway and crawfish or crayfish have their forms by catachresis [emphasis added].
It is this last definition that characterizes a grammatical error in the strict sense. Two such flagrant mistakes that can be heard constantly are the misuse of the phrase “beg the question” (cf. petitio principii, i.e., circular reasoning, circular argument, begging the question; in general, the fallacy of assuming as a premiss a statement which has the same meaning as the conclusion.), when the speaker wishes simply to say “raise the question;” and “vicious cycle” for “vicious circle” (circulus vitiōsus, i.e., a circular or flawed argument).

MICHAEL SHAPIRO