Catachresis

Not catechesis. Catachresis. Definitions vary in an orbital cloud around the concept of "the deliberate misuse of a word." Wikipedia goes into detail:

Common forms of catachresis are:

• Using a word in a sense radically different from its normal sense. ("Tis deepest winter in Lord Timon's purse" — Shakespeare, Timon of Athens)
  
  
• Using a word to denote something for which, without the catachresis, there is no actual name. ("a table's leg")
  
  
• Using a word out of context. [Note from Laura: Wikipedia's example for this was too dopey to reproduce, but I can't think of a better one yet.]
  
  
• Using paradoxes or contradictions. ("Black sun")
  
  
• Creating an illogical mixed metaphor. ("To take arms against a sea of troubles..." – Shakespeare, Hamlet)

Catachresis is often used to convey extreme emotion or alienation. It is prominent in baroque literature and, more recently, in dadaist and surrealist literature.

Other definitions include "The inappropriate use of one word for another, or an extreme, strained, or mixed metaphor, often used deliberately"; "Figure of association in which a highly unusual or outlandish comparison is made between two things. This figure moves beyond a metaphor by degrees -- the language used for comparative purposes is strikingly at odds with conventional usage"; and "A completely impossible figure of speech or an implied metaphor that results from combining other extreme figures of speech such as anthimeria, hyperbole, synaesthesia, and metonymy".

I bring this word to your attention because it recently caught mine as I was reading a collection from Samuel R. Delany of short pieces on writing. He was talking about the need to second-guess — to doubt — everything you do as a writer. And then to doubt the doubt. "After all," he writes, "that extra adjective may not be clutter but an interesting catachresis that allows us to see something unusual about the object." The trick is, he says, not to give anything the benefit of the doubt. (You can read nearly all the book here; thanks to Rod for the link!)

One of the reasons I do NaNoWriMo every year is to practice flow rather than doubt. The doubting I have down pat. I doubt myself into immobility more often than not. (Which is where the NaNo thing comes in.) One of my writer-buddies, Jason, uses "Sean Williamses", or SWs, as a unit of writing measurement. Sean Williams is a breathtakingly prolific Australian speculative-fiction author whose personal goal is, I'm told, 3,000 words on the page per day. Per day. Jason measures his own daily productivity thus: .5SW, or .25SW, or whatever the day's output has been. Doubt is the enemy of the SW. The SW is the enemy of doubt. In the center of this antagonism, stretched like a gummi worm, sits the poor writer.

I'm trying to figure out if I included any catachreses in that paragraph. I don't think so. But I'm not sure.