>While I’m in New Jersey, I’m going to visit my cousin in Brigantine.
>>The village that only appears once each century?
>Your thinking of ‘Brigadoon’.
>>Like the cookie?
>That would be Lorna Doone.
>>[singing] “Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky, stormy weather…”
>Lena Horne.
>>I didn’t know she was your cousin!
Is there a term for this kind of thing (besides “annoying”)?
“Malaprops”, we calls it here. To great effect!
Thanks! “Malaprop” doesn’t really capture the repeating aspect of it, but using it as a search term led me to the “malapropagations” threads. I love that word. If it’s not in common usage, it ought to be.
If you trace backwards on the generations at SDMB of Malapropagation games, you’ll find that in my earlier years we called it Cossack, based on the flow from cossack to cassock to hassock to hammock, ad infinitum. If there had been an “official” name for it, I never heard it. But, as you say, there really ought to be a name for it, and Malapropagation seems to fit so nicely. Best I can recall, that name was invented here! But it’s slipping my mind as to which clever Doper devised it. I’ll check after I post this.
Too many fun games from childhood never seemed to have official names and it might make for a fun task to see how many names things like this went by in our early years. The problem becomes finding suitable descriptions of the games we played, so that others can have a clue as to what they may have called the same pastime.
Take Hide and Seek or Tag as examples. How many different names must they have had?
Kick the can
Red Rover
Spin the bottle
Come I come
Highway alphabet
I spy
It was kunilou who was the one to name it Malapropagation.
FWIW I have always considered the term Malapropagation my most significant contribution to the SDMB.
Also, probably my only significant contribution.
This game is close to Carnelli:
That description reveals similarities to what we’ve played and called Malapropagations, but ours has been more contained and more of a one-word linking. No doubt the variants all spring from the same basic idea, but the OP’s notion of “serial wordplay” hints more of “word” than of “phrase” – at least to me.
I vote No on Carnelli.
I think you mean the Alphabet’s cereal game, where you spell words floating in milk before you can eat it.