Crabs and Other Crushed Asians

That is a malapropism from one tourist who wrote lamenting that, “Alan just can’t eat certain foods and crushed Asians” - we all know he meant crustaceans.  Now, I’m going to savage that - to which you will promptly say, “You mean salvage, don’t you?” Yes, that’s what I’ll try to do with some of these unfortunate misspoken gems. You see if there were European cannibals traveling in Cambodia and one of them was discussing another’s dietary restriction, the sentence may make sense.  I may have savaged it after all.  But that’s the world of malapropism.

Then there was someone quoting a Loretta Lynn’s song as, “Cool Minor’s Daughter” (correctly, Coal Miner’s Daughter). That can still be explained if one were describing a baby girl whose mom is a trendy teenager.  You have a few moments to think about that one… Got it?  You see, don’t be too quick to judge if you hear someone malaproping (if this is not a word, it should be. Or consider it a neologism – just a fancy way to say, making up a new word, inventing, if you will). That’s what I like about the English language because words get made up all the time.  I’ve come to embrace it though it is not my native tongue because it is a very efficient language. That will take up more to explain so we’ll stay with malapropism, meanwhile.

Mrs. Malaprop was a character in a 1775 play by R.B. Sheridan where the character would use the wrong words that sounded the same for the meaning she intended, to humorous effect. The comedic results in that play caught on and malapropism became an English word. That’s the beauty of the English language – what took one whole sentence at the beginning of this paragraph to explain was distilled into just one word. I read that the author Sheridan came up with the name, Mrs. Malaprop, from the French “mal a propos”, meaning “poorly placed”, hence the inappropriate use of words.  Of course, two hundred years prior to that Shakespeare had already used that technique for laughs on stage when one of his characters in the play, “Much Ado about Nothing”, officer Dogberry, butchered much of his speeches.  “Dogberryism”, though not as popular as malapropism, mean the same thing today.  Archie Bunker in “All in the Family” made malapropism his natural form of speech but I couldn’t find any that can be salvaged, tried as I could.  Try salvaging, “Buy one of those battery operated transvestite radios”. Or, “Last will and tentacle…”

I’ll try to salvage a few from others.  Comedian Norm Crosby said, “Listen to the blabbing brook”, a far cry from the more soothing “bubbling brook”.  But then he could have been talking about a tall model/actress who talked too much and whose last name was Shields. You may want that one to sink in slowly…take your time.  She was at one time married to tennis star Andre Agassi and she was known for the then controversially famous line she said of her blue jeans on a TV commercial.

Here’s a challenging one, “Having one wife is called monotony”. There is only one way and that is to make this a Freudian slip spoken by a Don Juan, or a Don Giovanni in Italian.  Speaking of Italian, how about, “Michelangelo painted the Sixteenth Chapel” (Sistine Chapel is a Vatican landmark).  Well, this malapropism works if there were more than fifteen chapels in Rome (very possible) and Michelangelo was indeed a very busy painter, who took on every commission to paint all the churches around.  “He is a wolf in cheap clothing” could be describing a philanderer who buys his suits from Goodwill or budget clothing stores. “He had to use a fire distinguisher” may require a lengthy explanation but a techno-geek may have no problem with it at all.  A thermal imager can determine accurately fire temperatures, as in furnaces, remotely with an optical sensor.  So a fire distinguisher would work to describe the thermal imager as the “iron horse” worked for Native Americans in describing the locomotive when they first saw it.  No need to call the Political Correctness (PC) police on this one, please.

By the way, genuine malapropisms (not the ones scripted in plays or television) are just mere mental lapses and not any kind of mental disorder. It’s not that difficult, for example, to say, “You don’t send me flour anymore”, mildly mutilating a love song. Of course, that could also come from a baker complaining to his supplier about not getting the most important ingredient for his business. Rest assured that if you’ve committed one you are perfectly normal (however, I’m not a psychiatrist, so don’t take my word for it). Speaking of normal, it is perfectly all right to add extra to your salad as when you say, "Be sure and put some of those protons on it."  However, if you were a particle physicist it would have been the thing to do if you were looking to stabilize a mix of sub-atomic particles that had way too much electrons in it.  And speaking of electrons Yogi Berra mused that, “Texas has a lot of electrical votes”.  As with many of Yogi’s gems, it’s best to just leave them alone and just smile. But when he did say, “When you see a fork on the road, take it”, he could very well have been referring to a silver ware of value, and we should take it indeed.

So when you hear a malapropos just smile, or better still try to think of a way to salvage it.