as in simile
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Example Sentences
Recent Examples of Synonyms for catachresis
Noun
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No metaphors or similes or hyperbolic language needed here – your kids are next.—
Rob Gagnon,
Hartford Courant,
25 Mar. 2025 -
Her father was a scientist and worked for NASA, so her work, including The Body’s Question and Life on Mars, is infused with the cosmos and space and all these metaphors and similes tied to the most mysterious places in the universe.—
Lisa Wong Macabasco,
Vogue,
22 Feb. 2025
Noun
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Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco have long received EU funds to ‘manage migration’ (a euphemism for preventing people from leaving their territories, often by force).—
Frey Lindsay,
Forbes.com,
19 Apr. 2025
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Whenever a flock is infected they are culled — a euphemism for killed — in order to stop the spread of the virus.—
Bruce Gil,
Quartz,
11 Feb. 2025
Noun
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One analogy that doctors use is to think of the nervous system as an automobile.—
Rustin Dodd,
New York Times,
1 May 2025
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To use a boxing analogy, the Giants at least have to get to one knee next season.—
Mike Lupica,
New York Daily News,
25 Apr. 2025
Noun
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Here, instead, she’s swayed by a dead Diana softly squeezing her hand and kindly hinting — the dead Diana is an ace at tactful circumlocution — that now is the time to show a mourning nation some emotion.—
Tom Gliatto,
Peoplemag,
16 Nov. 2023
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By condensing Balzac’s opus to a few paragraphs, Barthelme was having a laugh not just at his predecessor’s genteel circumlocution—his tendency to describe buildings and manufacturing procedures and family trees in lavish detail—but also at the conventions of novelistic mimesis itself.—
Giles Harvey,
The New York Review of Books,
23 Apr. 2020
Noun
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Cats, however, may turn out to be the canaries in the coalmines — pardon the mixed metaphor.—
Jan Ellen Spiegel,
Hartford Courant,
24 Dec. 2024
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Cats, however, may turn out to be the canaries in the coalmines — pardon the mixed metaphor.—
Jan Ellen Spiegel,
Hartford Courant,
24 Dec. 2024
Noun
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Halbreich told me that prominent art institutions are already using code words, like community, to talk about diversity.—
Rachel Corbett,
Vulture,
10 Apr. 2025
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These traffickers often use code words and emojis to avoid being detected by law enforcement or censored by platform guidelines.—
Rachel Hale,
USA Today,
3 Apr. 2025
Noun
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That last part is an apt metaphor for the city, which is on its sixth or 20th reinvention of itself, the days in which the Big Three auto companies created more than 470,000 jobs in the city and state of Michigan in the late ’70s are long gone.—
David Aldridge,
New York Times,
29 Apr. 2025
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While Nathan Fielder can still pay off his absurdly meticulous re-creation of a Houston airport terminal and the dozens of mimicked airline crew members and Panda Express workers inside it, the captain/co-pilot dynamic is proving to be an endlessly elastic metaphor.—
Scott Tobias,
Vulture,
28 Apr. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Catachresis.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/catachresis. Accessed 6 May. 2025.
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