The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Malapropisms
Is that a real person?

“My favorite dessert is chocolate mouse

with decimated coconut.”

Now, there’s something not quite right here. The person speaking has got some words and expressions a bit mixed up. This is called a malapropism. A malapropism is when you confuse words that may seem or sound similar, but have different meanings. So here the person probably meant that chocolate mousse was their favorite dessert, and they liked to eat it with desiccated coconut.

Like spoonerism and Tom Swifty,the word malapropism is an eponym named after a person, in this case Mrs. Malaprop. She wasn’t a real person, but a character in a play called The Rivals, written by Irish playwright Richard Sheridan in 1775. He gave her the name Mrs. Malaprop from a French phrase mal à propos,which means “not quite right.” If you ever get to see The Rivals,you will find yourself laughing and laughing. (The Word Snoop had to leave the theater and get herself a large glass of water, she was laughing so much.) It’s not because of anything Mrs. Malaprop does, but the things she says. For example, she compares someone to an allegoryon the Nile instead of an alligator,and even describes someone as “the very pineappleof politeness.” (Um, I think that should be pinnacle,Mrs. M!)

Of course, malapropisms existed long before Mrs. Malaprop appeared. Sometimes they are called Dogberryisms after a sort of policeman character called Dogberry who made the same sorts of mistakes as Mrs. Malaprop—and Dogberry appeared in a play by William Shakespeare that was written almost 200 years before The Rivals.

Malapropisms have been around as long as people have been speaking and writing and making mistakes (as we all do from time to time). They’re often found in the conversations of small children, who hear lots of new words each day. Sally Brown from Charles Schulz’s cartoon strip Peanuts talks about some cavemen who are “suddenly attacked by a huge thesaurus”; and the babies in the television cartoon Rugrats say things like: “Somebody got up on the wrong side of the bread ”and “For feet’s sake!”

But Mrs. Malaprop’s spirit lives on in grown-ups, too. Dorrie Evans, a favorite character in the long-running 1970s Australian soap opera Number 96, was a kind of modern-day Mrs. Malaprop, with remarks like: “Pardon me for protruding” (intruding) and “Life is not a bowl of cherubs” (cherries). And in the TV comedy Kath and Kim, both mother and daughter are constantly coming out with things like: “I don’t want to be rich. I want to be effluent” (affluent), or “The ozone diet? What does that pacifically (specifically) entail?” In fact, they are so well-known for this you will now sometimes find malapropisms called Kath and Kimisms.

What makes malapropisms so funny? Well, the Austrian psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud believed that the mistakes we make in speech (sometimes known as “Freudian slips”) tell us a lot of truth about ourselves—more, in fact, than when we say everything correctly. So perhaps we laugh because we are shocked by the sudden truths a malapropism reveals . . .

Hmm. Next time you write a story or a play, why not try livening it up with a few malapropisms? In the meantime, see if you can work out what’s not quite right about the sentences on the following page.

Malapropisms

1. An amphibious person can write with both hands.

2. Stop being such an idiom!

3. She was rushed to the hospital with a bad case of ammonia.

4. The old man with gray hair looked very extinguished.