24 hilarious examples of malapropisms

English, like any language, lends itself to hilarious mistakes and confusions. One of the best-known of these is uttering a malapropism, a word misused or wrongly applied, usually with the intention of showing off one’s erudition. The word comes from the name of a character in the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The Rivals (1775), Mrs Malaprop, noted for her ridiculous misuse of words (such as “contagious countries” for “contiguous” ones and “allegories” on the banks of the Nile when she meant alligators). Her name is derived from the French for “inappropriate” (mal à propos, literally “poorly placed”), since in her pretentious attempts to sound refined and cultured by using sophisticated language, Mrs Malaprop invariably mixes up her words. “You will promise to forget this fellow,” she haughtily tells a friend, “to illiterate him, I say, from your memory”. She meant, of course, “obliterate”! Unfortunately, she herself failed to live up to the advice she dispensed to another character “that she might reprehend the true meaning of what she is saying” — she intended to say “apprehend”, not “reprehend”.

Mrs Malaprop, of course, was merely a humorous fictional character in a piece of theatre, but malapropisms are far more common in real life than most people realise, since mixing up words one barely knows is a common human affliction. The American baseball player Yogi Berra famously spoke of Texas having a lot of “electrical votes” when he meant “electoral” ones. A television pundit solemnly spoke of “entomology” for the study of word origins rather than “etymology”. Many a would-be debunker of pedantry uses “obtuse” (which means stupid or slow-witted) when meaning “abstruse” (esoteric or difficult to understand). Others, trying to sound smart, render the expression “for all intents and purposes” as “for all intensive purposes”.

wknd@khaleejtimes.com