Another cat haiku

cataclysmic cat
catastrophic catharsis
catachrestic catch

haiku by M. LaFreniere

I think I remember in high school reading something Mark Twain wrote that all the words began with “cat”.  I tried to google it but couldn’t find it.  Maybe it doesn’t exist. Memory does funny things sometimes.

Speaking of funny, “catachresis” has a wikipedia entry with it’s definition:

“Catachresis (from Greek κατάχρησις, “abuse”), originally meaning a semantic misuse or error—e.g., using “militate” for “mitigate”, “chronic” for “severe”, “travesty” for “tragedy”, “anachronism” for “anomaly”, “alibi” for “excuse”, etc.—is also the name given to many different types of figures of speech in which a word or phrase is being applied in a way that significantly departs from conventional (or traditional) usage.”

I liked the catachresis wikipedia entry because it shows how some words are close to each other in meaning but also at core are very different. It’s one of the reasons a thesaurus is not as easy to use as some people think.

You can use the Amazon search bar to do a search as I did with “cat poetry”. Turns out there are a whole slew of books touting cat poetry out there.

My being an Amazon affiliate does not affect your price. Amazon disclosure: “We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.”