Friday, March 9, 2007

Malapropism


I'm still a little behind on my wotd entries, although this forum was never intended to try to hit each wotd entry; just the ones that motivate me. Malapropism is not a word I like to use because I will try to respect people's "use" of words out of context as emphasis or humor value for what they are trying to communicate. As you may have noticed from my previous posts, I like to try to stretch the applicable use, but I would not consider some of my broadened uses to be malapropisms as much as evocative language. But that's the difference in the definition of malapropism between "intentional" and "unintentional". I go on record now that all my alleged misuages are "intentional" and therefore, do not meet the definition of malapropism. Just wait until DD gives me "satire" or "sarcasm". I also abhor words that are based on proper nouns, although this one has a latent Latin construction for "bad word use," more so than the "words" coined from Gulliver's Travels...

Her emphasis of accusing the TSA of fondling her during their pat searches was mistaken as a malapropism by the supervisor.

2 comments:

JWu said...

As much as I love to learn and use new vocabulary, I'm afraid most of my attempts just result in embarrassing malapropism!

Lauren said...

Embrace the malapropism! Who will know what you intended???