The only thing that annoys us more than non-rhetoricians rampaging through the rhetorical china shop is when they're obviously right. Language Hat recently tried to hunt down the etymology of anthimeria, which seems malformed. Silva Rhetoricae defines the figure as "substitution of one part of speech for another (such as a noun used as a verb)". The intuitive etymology - Greek anti- "instead of" + mereia "a part" - doesn't account for the h. An alternative etymology - anthos "flower" + meros "part" - is obviously no better because the i suddenly has no place.

Turns out, based on work in the comments by this graduate student blogger, that rhetoricians kind of blew this call:

This is a misspelling of antimeria, I would guess popularized by Cuddon's ubiquitous book. Antimeria was considered synonymous with enallage. I've picked out a couple of definitions in Latin (that predate Cuddon) that I was able to find on Google Books. John Holmes Art of Rhetoric Made Easy (1755) defined the word in this way: 'Antimeria solet pro parte ponere partem.'

Very concise, and it indicates the etymology (anti + mer-; the -ia suffix is obviously used to mark the word as abstract)... Cuddon's 'flowerizing' definition is a good example both of enallage and of folk etymology, albeit of a mistaken form... I just pulled this up on JSTOR. K.R. Brooks, reviewing The Gothic Commentary on the Gospel of John by William Holmes Bennett (Modern Language Review 58.1, 1963, 87-88), noted this about typographical errors:

"It is a small fault, but a pity, that two grammatical terms of Greek origin, descriptive of figures of speech, should be consistently misspelt : for scesis (onomaton), which occurs on p. 36 and elsewhere, read schesis; for anthimeria (p. 39), read antimeria ..."

Language Hat ends up declaring "Now listen up, everyone, the word is antimeria; the -h- is just a garden-variety typo." Who wants to tell Silva Rhetoricae?

References:
* ANTHIMERIA [Language Hat]
* anthimeria [Silva Rhetoricae]
* Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 4, Penguin (Non-Classics), 2000. [Amazon]

Previously:
* Rhetoric Not So Much With the Revolution Thing
* Pentadic Ratios In The Rhetoric Of Addiction
* Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents - New Books We Can't Afford