MALAPROPISMS.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 128, 1 June 1908, Page 6

MALAPROPISMS.

THE MISAPPLICATION OF FINE

WORDS

Some amusing examples of "malapropisms," which Cassell's dictionary defines as "the misapplication of fine words,' 'are given by Mrs A. M. W. Stirling in the April number of the Albany _Review. Aotual misapplication occurs in such phrases as that of the old lady who, returning from the Zoo, announced that she "always did enjoy a visit to the Theological Gardens," or that of the servant who, describing her master's last illness, explained that "the doctors held a con^ solation and found that it was something eternal."

Then Mrs\ Stirling also quotes the lady who remarked that, when in Italy, she had seen "so many people in the garbage of monks with tonsils on their heads j" and that other worthy wife, who, wishing to complain that her husband was a martinet in his own family, proclaimed him as a "marmoset in his own home," and the old person in Punch who wants to know whether "soda-water should be written as two separate words, or if there should be a syphon between them." i;

But Mrs Stirling also considers as malapropisms "observations which present a false air of reasonableness"—

rather a wide extension of the term

—and the odd misunderstandings that occur in the examination-papers of schoolboys, unless, as we suspect, they are, more often, invented by the examiners. Of these, one of the best is the quotation "stored in the trouser house of mighty kings." Fine, too, is the answer that "excommunication means that no one is to speak to someone"—fine in its guarded vagueness. "Hovy did William I. put down the rebellions of the Saxons?"—"He put them down in Domesday book." "The lungs are organs of execration." "The base of a triangle is the side we don't talk about."

"A volcano is a burning mountain that has a creator, and throws out melted rocks." "If the earth did not revolt we should always have equal nights and days."" There are a few more or less amusing examples—not all of them malapropisms, in the narrow sense, but mistakes we are grateful to the schoolboys (or the schoolmasters) for having made, and to Mrs Stirling for recalling.—Mirror.