July 7, 2000

Hear's to Mrs. Malaprop

Inducing Malapropisms  

"The Smith family requests your presents at the celebration of the golden wedding anniversary of..." "You will promise to forget this fellow—to illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory." What is unusual about these statements?

The 1775 Restoration comedy, The Rivals, by Richard Sheridan introduced the humorous character, Mrs. Malaprop. Her name comes from the French mal à propos, which means inappropriate. The self-educated Mrs. Malaprop was always substituting a similar-sounding word for the word that she intended to use. Here are some examples of her speech:

  • "Make no delusions to the past."
  • "Oh! It gives me the hydrostatics to such a degree!"
  • "I have interceded another letter from the fellow."

Sheridan was not the first playwright to create a character with these ignorant slips-of-tongue. Shakespeare used this technique for various characters. For example, Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream often used the wrong word: "'Thisby, the flowers of odious savors sweet.'" (III.i.81) Audiences in Shakespeare's day would have known that Bottom meant "odorous savors sweet" as in sweet smelling, instead of "odious," which means hateful.

But it was Mrs. Malaprop whose name became associated with the language phenomenon of malapropisms. Sometimes her unintentional word substitutions actually provide insight into a character. She describes someone as "the pineapple of perfection" (instead of the common phrase "the pinnacle of perfection"). Since the person whom she is praising actually has the brains and roughness of the tart, spiky fruit, her slipup is more accurate!

Malapropisms for Dummies  

Authors and playwrights sometimes use malapropisms to paint a negative portrait of a character. In Barbara Kingsolver's novel, The Poisonwood Bible, four American sisters are taken by their missionary father to live in the jungles of the Congo. The oldest sister, Rachel, is depicted as a superficial, egocentric teenager out of touch with the Africa in which she finds herself. Kingsolver sprinkles Rachel's speech with malapropisms:

  1. "Already I was heavy-hearted in my soul for the flush commodes and machine-washed clothes and other simple things in life I have took for granite."

  2. "Then she'd stomp out to the kitchen hut and build such a huge fire in the iron stove you'd think she was Cape Carniveral launching a rocket ship."

  3. "My sisters gawked at the fascinating stranger and hung on his every syllabus of English."

  4. Thirty-four years later and still in Africa, Rachel continues to speak in malapropisms:

    "...I can always look back on it as just one more day like any other. But it sure gives you something to compensate upon."
  • In the table below, identify the malapropisms in Rachel's statements. What word did she really mean to use?
  • How do the malapropisms make you feel about her character?
Statement Malapropism Correct Word
1.    
2.    
3.    
4.    
Malapropisms in Politics

The Web site The Complete Bushisms presents a collection of statements made by presidential candidate George W. Bush. Here are two:

"Other Republican candidates may retort to personal attacks and negative ads." -Fund-raising letter from George W. Bush, quoted in the Washington Post, March 24, 2000

"I appreciate preservation. It's what you do when you run for president. You gotta preserve." -Speaking at Fairgrounds Elementary School in Nashua, N.H., as quoted in the LA Times, Jan. 28, 2000

 

- Identify the malapropism in each statement.

- What image of George W. Bush is the collector of these statements trying to present? Do you think that this person will vote for Bush in the election?

Check out what Doonesbury has to say about Bush's language.


Slips of the Tongue and More  

In addition to classical malapropisms, there are slips-of-the-tongue in which the speaker knows the right word but just can't get the word out. These errors usually occur for pairs of words that have one or more of the following characteristics:

  • They are the same part of speech (portend for pretend, inflammable for inflammatory).

  • They have similar beginnings or endings (exciting for excited, anecdote for antidote).

  • They use similar word rhythm (exhibition for expedition).

Sandy Reed, editor-in-chief of InfoWorld, coined the term "technopropism" after reading an announcement about a class that would teach "how to 'stay on tract with your agenda.'" Reed defines technopropism as "an unintentional but ludicrous misuse of a word that occurs when language and the tools of technology collide, particularly misuses that a human could have caught but a spelling checker didn't."

Spell checkers in computers have introduced a whole new range of malapropisms. Suppose you want to type "a week on the yacht or at the beach house," but you accidentally type "a week on the yact or at the beach hojse." If you are distracted while you run this phrase through your spell checker, you just might accept the first alternative that it offers you for correcting each mistake. The resulting text according to Microsoft® Word's spell checker would become, "a week on the act or at the beach hogs."

Global find-and-replace actions and autocorrect features on word processing programs can also introduce technopropisms. While preparing an article that ran recently in a leading U.S. newspaper, a copyeditor evidentally accepted the autocorrect feature's suggestion to change the word "black" to "African-American." The printed version of the article contained statements like, "The dalmatian had African-American spots."

Hearing the Wrong Words  

Some malapropisms result from mishearing a word or phrase. This misunderstanding is particularly common with song lyrics, where the melody and the instrumentation may interfere with the words. In the 1950s, columnist Sylvia Wright coined the name "mondegreen" for misheard song lyrics. Why mondegreen? Wright recounted hearing the lyrics of a Scottish folk song: "Oh, they have slain the Earl o' Morray and laid him on the green." Only she heard them as "Oh, they have slain the Earl o' Morray and Lady Mondegreen."

Recognize this song?

"Jose, can you see by the donserly light
What so proudly we held at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars threw the penniless fight..."

You can enjoy misheard song lyrics at one of the following sites:

  • Kiss This Guy (based on the common rendition of Jimi Hendrix's "'scuse me while I kiss the sky")

Students often mishear names and concepts in class lectures. Teachers probably understand how students come up with statements like the following:

  • In midevil times most people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the futile ages was Chaucer.
  • William Shakespeare wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet.

Shakespeare himself would probably enjoy this description. Maybe he would have even borrowed it for one of his plays.

 

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