The Armchair Linguist

Malapropisms

Malapropisms have always been a fascinating thing to me. My understanding of what a malapropism is is when someone makes an incorrect choice, placing an inappropriate word which sounds similar to the desired word in a place where the wrong word actually makes sense, in an odd sort of way.

My favourite one was a story my father told about a favourite aunt of his who, when she saw that rain was about to ruin her family's picnic plans, exclaimed, "How irrigating!" Of course, she meant "irritating", but since irrigation has to do with water, the mistake becomes very amusing.

I recently ran across two malapropisms in conversations with non-native speakers of English, where of course they are quite common. One was with a friend, who was discussing the shortcomings of using a pedometer to measure how many steps you take in a day, and said, "You shouldn't let that detour you." The correct word choice would of course have been "deter", but in a way "detour" made perfect sense.

The most recent was in an e-mail from a former student, who had not been able to register for a course she wanted to take this semester because she was too far down the waiting list. When she heard that a friend of hers would be dropping the course, she asked, "Is there any possibility I can go insert of him and register my name?" Unfortunately, our system doesn't work that way, but her use of "insert" instead of "instead" made sense, in a way, in this situation.

Another interesting phenomenon is when a malapropism becomes so ingrained in the language that the term actually changes. The classic example of this in English is the word chaise lounge, which was originally chaise longue, French for "long chair", but as it is used for lounging, somehow the switch to chaise lounge, involving a metathesis of the "u", made perfect sense to English speakers not accustomed to using French terms. This is now the more commonly accepted term.

Labels: lexical choice, lexical item, linguistics, malapropism, malapropisms, vocabulary

posted by Laura Blumenthal @ 2:24 p.m.