Several times over the years I've come across people making mistakes which
were natural in a peculiar way.  They're almost puns; the wrong word was
used, but it *sounds like* the right word & (in context) means something
like the right thing.  I'm wondering if anyone else has run across any.  I
find them tremendously amusing, also thought-provoking.
Two examples come to mind now.  The first was in the report of a church
benevolence committee.  The chairman kept saying (writing) that they had
"dispersed" such-and-such a sum for such-and-such a purpose.  Her reason for
not saying "given" or some such was, of course, that she'd heard such reports
talking about what was *disbursed*.
Second example: in minutes of a meeting, someone was repeatedly quoted as
saying "within the perimeters of ...", and objected violently that he'd
said "parameters" & that's what he meant.  (I protest that perimeters is
what he *should* have meant, but I would have heard what he said;
the person taking the minutes was unfamiliar with what was then new
technobabble.)

Is that a clear enough explanation?  Any other examples?  I won't complain
about made-up ones if they're no more bizarre than the preceding.

63 responses total.

The term for such mistakes is MALAPROPISMS, from Mrs. Malaprop, a
character from the 18th-century British play "The Rivals".  She
utters these "malapropisms" through the whole play.  The only one
I remember offhand was about "an allegory wading along the banks
of the Nile."

What I have in mind is just a hair different; but you're right that the
word I should have used for contrast is exactly that.  With Mrs. Malaprop,
there was in fact no allegory wading, but an alligator (I presume).  But
money was i fact dispersed, in my example.  And (picky me) the cited use
of "parameters" was in fact gibberish (though starting to be commonplace
gibberish - this was maybe 1977 or 1978 or so), whereas "perimiiter"
(singular) made pretty reasonable sense.

If I say I mean a malapropism which fortuitously maintains the intended or
other appropriate meaning, is that better?

Is "The Rivals" Sheridan?  I remember about Mrs. M, but doubt I ever read
the play.  (I won't ask how you came to have it at your fingertips.)
Thurber had a character like that, with the twist that accent seems to
be at issue (?), in "What Do You Mean it _Was_ Brillig?" - but I had to
pull it off the shelf (Thurber Carnival, orig from My World & Welcome To It)
& search a minute.
 > "They are here with the reeves," she said. ... I got out the big Century
 > Dictionary ... and looked up "reeve."  It is an interesting word, like
 > all of Della's words; I found out that there are four kinds of reeves.
 > "Are they here with strings of onions?" I asked. ... ... ... "They are
 > here with the reeves for the windas," said Della with brave stubbornness.
 > Then, of course, I understood what they were there with: they were there
 > with the Christmas wreaths for the windows. ...
(I can only take so much of Thurber at a time.  Some of the examples are
however malapropisms pure & simple.)
Thanks & good buy.

I don't have a copy, I just saw it on A&E a few years ago.  Loved it.

Pardon my ignorance or forgetfulness: what is A&E?  (If it's TV-related
I wouldn't recognize it.)

(Assuming it is Sheridan??:) I used to have _The School for Scandal_ (& also
an anthology of plays from that period with something else & probably _The
Rivals_).  School for Scandal is really nice; but it was a long time ago.
(Either this stuff is still in box somewhere (unlikely) or filed somewhere
unobvious (all too likely) or it didn't survive the great purges of a few
years back.  (The first couple of hundred books to go weren't too bad; after
that it got painful.)

I've heard lots of malapropisms, one of my favorites is "..to all intensive
purposes..." when they really mean "to all intents and purposes."

Right, & that could be more appropriate...

From a work of fiction (Dell Shannon, somewhere): a character refers to a
"Germing Shepherd"

Recently my mom was advised to "take the bag out of the vacuum cleaner
and disregard it."

Was this by any chance from an owners' manual or something similar?  Now that
I think of it, a wide variety of strange & bemusing usage seems to be quite
common these days, in such documents apparently produced in the Far East or
(occasionally) Europe or Latin America.

No, this was part of instructions she got over the phone.

I may be wrong, but I think I heard another one - and she should have
known better if it is an error.  On public radio news yesterday there
was an item about the settling of a dispute about whether Switzerland
would accept toxic waste from Australia (or vice versa) and how the
Australians were in a furor over it.  She repeatedly read "Australia".
Isn't Austria much more likely?

The only thing that separates Switzerland from Austria is Lichtenstein,
while continents and oceans separate Switzerland and Australia.  So...
Undoubtedly the dispute involves Switzerland and Austria.

We certainly have logic on our side, don't we?

Re #11:  In many places, nothing separates Switzerland from Austria.

(This kind of thing *really* bugs me..)

My bringing it up?  or the error?  (Let's assume it was one...)
Errors like this kind of tickle me when there's nothing riding on it,
particularly when it's really obvious.  When they really sow confusion, or
degrade useful distinctions, or something like that they bug me a lot too.

re 13; WAIT! Don't forget currency, political system, in many areas
language....the list is endless, there are many many separators.

I believe that Lichtenstein uses the Swiss Franc for its currency.
(Is that one translates "Franken?")  No more truvia for today.

Re #16:  The error, of course.  I meant people's lack of knowledge about
geography.

Then you'll probably hate this one.  It's the dialogue of a comic strip which
appeared in the Milan Area Leader a couple of weeks ago, & doesn't make a
whole lot of sense (to me, anyway) even if you ignore the error:

    "Check out the whale passing under us ... I stand corrected. It's a
submarine. ... It's a Russian sub."  [The last as man emerges from sub's
hatch.  He says:]
     "No, this the Arminian part of the sub.  The Russian part is in the
middle of the sub."

(Personally, I wonder where that leaves us Calvinists.)

I just remembered another one.  A few years back, a friend (now dead, I'm
afraid) mentioned that he had bought a "munching mower" - so called because
it keeps the grass under it & munches it up into tiny pieces.  (Makes sense
to me!)

And the audience responds with tumulchuous applause ......

        -redneck at zoning meeting:
                -refers to a creek that has been argued about as
                 leading to important wetlands as an 'emotional drain';
                -refers to the perimiter or the peripheral areas of
                 the land as the 'perifiter'

        -recent AA News:
                -after the basketball game the rowdy crowd was 'disbursed'

        -these don't all fit all the criteria, I know . .

A favorite of mine is when the right word is used but with the 
unintentional wrong meaning, as in "The exception proves the rule.",
which many people thinks means that the rule is established by the
exception, which is ridiculous. Does anyone know of another example
of this?

Well, the classic one is "Suffer the little children ...".  As with yours,
loss of an original major meaning is what makes it seem so bizarre.

Eric Rabkin gave a commentary recently on WUOM on "reversible words" -
his term for words that also mean their opposites. The example I recall
is "ravel", which also means "unravel". Two dictionary definitions are
1. to make complicated or tangled, and 3. to make clear; disentangle.
He had several more examples, and speculated at the end that perhaps
all words are reversible. A frightening prospect!

 cleave

Eric Rabkin's commentaries are great.  I wrote to him and suggested
that he get the U-M Press to print a collection of them.  

I managed to hear the one in question, too, & enjoyed it a lot.  (Somehow
my listening times often don't correlate well with UOM's commentary
schedule.  This is sometimes a blessing, but Rabkin is usually worth hearing.)

Katie, I looked at your "cleave" for some time before it hit me! Yes!
If the dictionary's etiology is right, one is from the OE *cleofan*,
and the other from the OR *celofian*, which I would presume were at
one time pronounced differently. 

Don't you look at my cleave. You men are all alike.

She's just been waiting for the chance to say that.

And I walked right into it! Nice trap. 

Yep, that was a booby trap all right.

        OUCH!   ;)

At the risk of sounding sexist, I must say that was a real hooter, Johann.

I am now doing penchance for having bared this thread.

Hm.

getting back on the SUBJECT here, how about "I could care less", when the
speaker actually means "I couldn't care less"? 
Also, "in" is a confusing prefix: "inconvenient" would mean that it wasn't
convenient, but "inflammable" means flammable! English is so much fun!

The "in" in "inflammable" is from the word "inflame".

Rabkin mentioned the *in* in inflammable being a drift from the prefix
*en*, which conveys "to make or cause" (enable, endanger, enheighten).

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss