malapropisms

malapropisms
malapropisms
Fowler (1926) was right to point out that malapropisms, or ‘the use of a word in mistake for one sounding similar’, occur occasionally, as ‘single spies, not in battalions, one in an article, perhaps, instead of four in a sentence’, unlike the utterances of the eponymous Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan's The Rivals of 1775 in which they come thick and fast. Two modern examples:

• One, a head of English, could not explain the function of an intransigent [instead of intransitive] verb and advised me to ‘forget it’ —letter in Sunday Times, 1988

• When she heard our Gloucester house was haunted, she uttered the immortal line, ‘You'll have to get the vicar in to circumcise [instead of exorcise] it —J. Cooper, 1991.


Modern English usage. 2014.

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