Look, there’s a book—nay, a play—called The Rivals from 1775. Richard Sheridan, the playwright, created the amusing character of Mrs. Malaprop (from French mal à propos, meaning ‘inappropriate’) who frequently misspoke by using words that sounded like the intended word but essentially rendered her sentences nonsensical. For instance: “He is the very pine-apple of politeness!” exclaimed Mrs. Malaprop (instead of pinnacle)—or “illiterate him quite from your memory” (instead of obliterate) and “she's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile” (instead of alligator). This character and speaking pattern led to the coining of an official name for these common speech errors—malapropisms.
They carry on into the modern world. Mike Tyson, after losing a world title fight to Lennox Lewis, declared that he might fade into Bolivian (oblivion). Some folks on the internet wish to join Hogwarts’s Huff & Puff (Hufflepuff), stuff their pan tree (pantry), and play Rush and Roulette (Russian Roulette).
They’re all too common (or so I’ve heard from the friend who pointed me in the direction of r/BoneAppleTea). You may have heard of it; if not, please stop embarrassing yourself and spend more time on Twitter. Learn from Lady Gaga:
At this pacific point, I would like to point out that malapropisms are not refined to works of friction. They are more common and less humorous in real life. Our use of words depends upon our mental lexicon (the mental dictionary containing all our knowledge of definitions, pronunciation, and word structure). And this dictionary in our brain fails us often. Let us try to understand why.
According to researchers David Fay and Anne Cutler, malapropisms have three key characteristics:
The error is a “real” word
The error and target are unrelated in meaning
The error and target are closely related in pronunciation
One hypothesis is that malapropisms tell us about how our mental lexicons are organized—semantically (based on comprehension and logic) or by sound pattern (based on phonetic information like stress pattern and number of syllables). This determines how you retrieve the words stored in your mental dictionary (spoiler alert: the semantic organization yields more accurate results).
Malapropisms seem very similar to another popular form of wordplay—puns. But here’s the difference: puns are an intentional play on the dual meaning of words whereas a malapropism is a faulty word-selection yielding phrases that no longer make sense. There are other things that look like malapropisms but aren’t. There’s a speech error that linguists call anticipation, where you mistakenly use a letter too soon. For instance, Ted Kennedy once gave a speech about education, where anticipating the br sound in brightest, he said, “Our national interest ought to be to encourage the breast and brightest.” Some people tried to assign unconscious meaning to the phrase by calling it a Freudian slip, also known as parapraxis, which is an error in speech or action that is believed to be stemming from a subdued internal train of thought or desire.
An (almost) opposite of anticipation is a perseveration, where the sound from the previous word perseveres and is carried forward to the next word, for example, saying “it’s raining rats and dogs.” There’s another category called spoonerisms, where the sounds from two words are interchanged. Examples include “three cheers for our queer old dean!” (instead of “dear old queen”) and “well-boiled icicles” (instead of “well-oiled bicycles”). Merriam Webster tells the amusing origin story of the word spoonerism like this:
Poor William Archibald Spooner! That British clergyman and educator, who lived from 1844 to 1930, often had to speak in public, but he was a nervous man and his tongue frequently got tangled up. He would say things like "a blushing crow" when he meant "a crushing blow." Spooner's letter reversals became the stuff of legend-and undoubtedly gave his listeners many a laugh. By 1900 his name had inspired the term spoonerism, which lives on to this day.
Spoonerisms also feature in folk etymology, or fake origin stories for words. For instance, some people believe that the word butterfly comes from the phrase flutter by. But that’s just a lack of pies. Sorry, a pack of lies.
Nun-the-less, the truth is there can be numerous slips of tongue in your everyday encounters with language. As minions ravaged by blushing crows (crushing blows), nosey little cooks (cosy little nooks) or dizzy beans (busy deans) have shown, it’s dangerous using words. Stay safe out there!