Dan Weinreb (one of the Multics users who brought the Multics condition system to Lisp) wrote about why "error" is not a great term: http://danweinreb.org/blog/what-conditions-exceptions-are-re...

Personally, I've not seen it used for arbitrary control flow. If you control the syntax of things inside your block, then macros are probably good enough. If you're passing values outside of your own block, then you probably need continuations.

OTOH, Lisp programmers have a tendency to not care what something is "supposed to be used for". Using Lisp at all is said to be "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". :-)