Does it count in another language? I had a history professor who kept refering to Hitler’s demands for “liebensraum.” I had to inform him that meant “loving space.”
If German malapropisms are fair game, I made a doozy once, myself (well, probably many, but only one was memorable). The assignment was to write a love poem. One line of mide described the lover as the most important thing in my life. Except that I used * Leber * to mean life, instead of * Leben *. In so doing, I described the person as the most important thing in my liver.
We’ve got a good example just a few thread titles away:
Diety Deathmatch… it all comes down to this: Thor, God of Thunder V Zeus
Considering what some female fashion models are doing to their bodies “Diety Deathmatch” sounds vaguely ominous.
Ditto what Ringo said, BUT –
Personally, I’ve adopted “cow-orker” as a specific term that is distinct from “co-worker.” In my little world, a co-worker is a respected colleague, a cow-orker is that idiot who blunders through the work day generally making a mess of things.
I love cow-orker! I’m sure we all know plenty of cows (male and female - no gender bias here!) who ork around trodding on any foot within a mile radius and mucking up every possible task.
Oh, oops. I think I AM a cow-orker! hides head in humiliation
Back to malapropisms - a friend of mine used to say frequently that she was very photogenic. She meant that she liked to have pictures taken of her, not that she was particularly stunning in those pictures.
I don’t think there IS a word for what she was trying to say.
One of my teachers in high school was always mixing up phrases or using the wrong word. I can’t remember any specific ones right now, but here’s one of my favorites from tv:
[Friends]
Joey: Well, it’s a moo point.
Someone else (forget who): What!?
Joey: It’s a moo point. It’s like a cow’s opinion… it doesn’t matter.
[/Friends]
Bwahahahahaha
Not strictly on topic but…my brother used to call people “I-dots” instead of idiots.
Which I guess made HIM one. Heh.
Kn*ckers: Maybe photophilia?
[sub]Or would that be sex with cameras?[/sub]
How about a Japanese malapropism…
I was finishing off a rather decent lunch and it came time to pay up and head out. I wanted to yell, “Go-Kai-kei Onegai Shimasu!”, which pretty much means, “Check, please!”
The lady looked at me very strangely until I realized what I had actually said: “Go-Kyuu-kei Onegai Shimasu!” (The two are very similar in Japanese.) It pretty much meant I told her in a loud voice over the entire restaurant something like, “I want you to take a short vacation!”
I thought it was funny, albeit embarrassing.
m
more mixed metaphors than malaprops, but some of the better ones are:
“wild horses on bended knees”
“bite the nettle by the horns”
I understand the original saying (yo, we’ll worry about that later, what about this crap we have to deal with right in front of us), but I usually go with “We’ll cross that bridge when we find it”, out of deep respect for Duran Duran.
I also use Devil’s avocado on purpose to disarm the person I’m talking to.
Waenara wrote: “Joey: Well, it’s a moo point.”
I saw a draft of a letter my friend had written to a client of hers, mentioning a “mute point”. I can only hope that this was caught before the final version went out, but I have my doubts.
I was once doing tech support for someone who talked about the “cursing flasher” on her computer screen. She realized her mistake and didn’t stop laughing for half a minute.
For plain bad usage, I like my friend who was anticipating a drunken evening: “I want to go out and get imbibed.”
My little brother, many years ago at a family wedding, referred to the cummerbund on his tuxedo as a “come-around-the-buns.”
I thought he was wearing it a bit too low.
My daughter’s friend, on seeing a porcupine for the first time: “Oooh, look at the cactapus!”
Another German malapropism… (How do you say “malapropism” in German?)
A friend of mine was writing a paper (in German) for her history class during a semester abroad in Germany. The sentence she wanted to write was something like, “The bishops gained access to the pope through excessive flattery.”
Unfortunately, she picked the next word after flattery in her English-German dictionary and the the sentence ended up coming out, “The bishops gained access to the pope through excessive flatulence.”
This cracked me up because I immediately thought: “Quoth the raisin: ‘I heard it through the grapevine.’”
Re: the Devil’s Avacado - for some reason my husband and I always say “Devil’s Abacus” (funnier that way, don’tcha know, not that it comes up THAT often.)
Once when I was working at a movie theater someone called up and asked if we’d be getting 101 Damnations. We laughed so long and hard at her that she wrote a letter to our district office complaining about us.
My little brother said a whole bunch one night:
- He wanted to know if they were going to sedate him for an MRI. His question: Am I going to be seduced?
2)on the contraire
3)infloated (meant inflated)
4)Stop writing down my malaprons!
(He’s 11)
I do not speak French, but I have a friend who is attempting to learn. At dinner one night in Paris, her French friends asked her what she had done to get her normally straight hair wavy. She MEANT to say she slept with a bun on her head, but the French word for such a thing is chignon. She mispronounced, and the literal English translation of her reply was, “I slept with a Chinaman on my head.”
A recent court case in England saw the judge (or whatever the proper term is) presiding over the issue of sex changes. A recipient (male to female) was contesting the right to have her birth certificate altered to reflect the change. The judge’s decision, a categorical no. His words:
“Birth certificates are historical documents and you can’t go around changing these things willy-nilly.”
In law school, we had a guy who constantly pronounced words incorrectly. We read a case about a Chinese couple and were talking about wonton disregard…
He, of course, pronounced it won-ton.
Tibs.