solecism /SOL-i-siz-əm/ /ˈsɒlɪsɪz(ə)m/. noun. A grammatical mistake or a non-standard usage. More generally: a mistake, a blunder, a breach of etiquette, a lapse in manners, an impropriety. See also: faux pas, gaffe, blunder. From Greek soloikos (speaking incorrectly or awkward/rude in manner). Perhaps originally meaning to speak like the people of Soloi, a Greek colony whose inhabitants spoke a corrupted form of Greek.
“They were all bad spellers, and their memos, alive with solecisms, made Puttermesser grieve, because they were lawyers, and Puttermesser loved the law and its language.” (Cynthia Ozick)
“His son said nothing; only the red of his cheek merged deeper, as if I had committed a solecism we must both ignore.” (Hortense Calisher)
“He [Tantalus] also committed the unpardonable solecism of telling tales about the private lives and mannerisms of the gods, amusing his courtiers and friends with insolent mimicry and gossip.” (Stephen Fry)
“The trouble with using a borrowed language is that you have no right to make too many mistakes in it. Now, it is by seeking a certain incorrectness without however abusing it, it is by continually approaching solecism, that writing may be given the appearance of life.” (E. M. Cioran)
“Martial states that his cock often commits solecisms, implying that an eloquent wife would comment upon them. In short, he does not want a wife who would criticize either his grammar or his sexual conduct.” (Susan McLean)
“In 1848 it was ‘an unpardonable solecism’ for the daughters of a gardener to drive down Regent Street in a hansom cab (Paxton and the Bachelor Duke, by Violet Markham, ); that solecism became a crime, of what magnitude theologians must decide, if the flaps were left open.” (Virginia Woolf)
“He, too, was disturbed by the”heap of filth” in the language and thought the Fowlers would be just the right people to remove it. The brothers proposed a few titles for their planned book: The New Solecist, A Book of Solecisms, and The Clarendon Press Book of Solecisms. None pleased the marketing division…” (Jack Lynch)
“Tom o’Bedlam is the opposite of the Erasmian fool, for his religion is fabricated of grotesque superstitions, cemented by paranoid delusions of diabolical persecution, which have been turned to profit by imposing upon genuinely simple people. The religious maniac’s solecisms are erected into an anti-rational system, the ultimate expression of man’s mad pride.” (Germaine Greer)
“…indeed we all know how badly and ungrammatically most of us converse in our own tongue, whilst we are so dreadfully cautious and fearful of perpetrating blunders and solecisms in a foreign one.” (Elizabeth Gaskell)