Catachresis and Decorum in the Rhetorical Criticism

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In rhetoric catachresis is defined as an improper transfer of meaning. According to Quintilian, it is a “necessary misuse. In pseudo-Cicero’s view, catachresis is distinguished from metaphor proper by its dissimilarity of the transferred meaning. In most cases, catachresis is characterized by its far-fetched, overreaching or even transgressing use of metaphoric words. Strictly speaking, however, every kind of metaphor is catachrestic in its initial stage and in its essence. Catachresis occurs whenever there is a need to name a new reality or to verbalize an unnamable new subjective experience. As shown in the phrase of a dead metaphor “the leg of a table,” catachresis is a necessity in the evolution of a language to make up for its poverty of expressions. As Friedrich Nietzsche speaks of metaphors as a sort of “a mobile army of language,” catachresis plays an inevitable and dominant part in our linguistic usage and functions as a mediator between two different dimensions of experience and reality. It is an old bottle with new wine.
However, catachresis is not so extravagant as it is imagined to be. For the early modern English grammarians and rhetoricians, catachresis was to be sealed off by the idea of decorum. Decorum was central in the division of styles: the high or sublime, the middle, and the low or humble. It is ethical and class-bound. Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his conversation with the gravediggers complains of the new fashion and social manners of the peasants, who follow the heels of their superiors and catch their chilblain. He is adverse to the mingling of styles and social manners across the class boundary.
In the transitional era of early modernity, catachresis was the very linguistic gear to fill up the gaps and lacks in a lexicon. In the face of the dangerous development of infectious catachresis, decorum is the great wall to keep up the ethical and socio-cultural barriers. Decorum was an ideological apparatus in early modern England to contain the social and linguistic mobilization.

참고문헌 (Reference)

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