The improper use of a word, or its misapplication. The financial pages of any newspaper abound with examples, e.g., ‘grow your business’, which misapplies an agricultural term. It can also mean the application of a word to a thing or action for which no proper word exists. For example, we ‘board’ trains and aeroplanes, but since these are both relatively recent inventions there was no pre-existing term to describe how one enters these machines so one was borrowed from seafaring. Similarly, catachresis can be a means of creating thought-provoking metaphors such as Nietzsche’s famous pronouncement that ‘truth is a woman’.