The joys of inadvertent English

You know them. The grammar police— those officious people who patrol print newspapers and swoop down for the kill over picayune points of English grammar, such as the failure of a sentence to contain a verb. Every once in a while, they show their hand in letters to the editor pages, demonstrating how some egregious flaw that the paper will not admit to heralds the imminent decline of western civilization. That’s why the Times employs a highly paid staff of sophisticated proofreaders and editors, who ensure that its beat reporters and columnists have never yet made a grammatical mistake.

But have the grammar police taken all the fun out of the inadvertently improper use of the English language? I say no. And I’d better be right, because this is supposed to be a humour column.

I’ll put forward the example of the malapropism, named for the character Mrs. Malaprop in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals. To utter a malapropism is to reach for the apt word and just fail, often quite spectacularly, in your choice. Mrs. Malaprop, for example, would say “she might reprehend the true meaning of what she is saying.” Or she might call someone “as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.”

In fact, it was that very creature that turned me on to the malapropism. In the 1960 British comedy I’m all right, Jack, Peter Sellers played a union official without an abilityto- see-the-humour side to him (I guess, in another guise, he could have joined the language police). He stood up in front of a crowd, denounced the allegations made against him, and vowed revenge against the “allegator.” Some years later, I enjoyed a rather pompous book review in the Globe and Mail, in which the reviewer noted the author had faced “too big a bridge to gap.” The image of the reviewer— and his editor—travelling around the country finding bridges to gap stayed with me for a long time. As did the secondary image of the mortification that must have set in upon the discovery of such a large mistake.

My favourite real life malapropism came when I was working for an organization that had many problems, chief of which was the overzealousness of its untrained staff. We held a brainstorming session, and a colleague proposed a way to tackle the problem. He cautioned us, however, that his idea was not a “pancreas.” To his surprise, he found universal agreement.

Poor old George W. Bush was a master of the malapropsim. Take—please—”I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for [my] predecessors as well.” Or how about Bush’s own successor at the comedy microphone, Archie Bunker, who once referred to a “last will and tentacle.” (I know what you’re thinking: that isn’t the malapropism you would have come up with). And sometimes the utterer of a malapropism can unwittingly speak a profound truth, as perhaps did former Chicago mayor Richard Daley when he said “the police are not here to create disorder, they’re here to preserve disorder.”

Malapropisms work their way into County life, of course. I’ll give two examples. In a recent issue of the Picton Gazette, historian Peter Lockyer was quoted (no doubt to his chagrin) as stating we have a “proud navel tradition.” I’m sure we do: there is a lot of fine dining in the County, and many people have enjoyed surveying the result. A councillor told me that whenever somebody makes a deputation, he swears that he hears the chair of the meeting asking the “debutante” to step forward (no doubt to have a ball speaking to council); although let’s assume this is a case of wishful malapropism.

Now I admit there is a fine line between laughing at the image created by the inexact choice of words, and simply laughing at the lack of sophistication of the utterer of the mistake. And of course, I’m against the latter. So when is it okay to laugh? I haven’t got a formula, but I’d say that it has something to do with the presence of pompousness, the sheer disconnect between the intended and the imparted image, and the spontenaiety of the listener’s reaction. So, the Globe and Mail’s recent, uncorrected, use of the notorious “in principal” misphrasing (remember, the principal is your pal?) is so mundane that I just can’t bring myself even to grin at it. I assume the grammar police have already added the example to their files.

Can I give an example, then, of something I do find funny? Just, as a friend of mine put it, as a momemtum? Consider it done.

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca