Nigerian malaproppery

Stahlke, Herbert F.W. hstahlke at BSU.EDU
Mon Aug 30 02:48:16 UTC 2004


I suspect this may have been more than just the normal malaprop.  In the Nigerian English of the sort who seem to send the emails there is a strong tendency towards what they sometimes call "fine talk", using the biggest, most learned sounding words they can find whether they make sense or not.  It's the sound and overall impression they are going for.  But you have to hear it from within Nigerian culture to appreciate it.  There's a 1998 novel by Karen King-Aribisala titled Kicking Tongues, Canterbury Tales transplanted to Nigeria, that has some truly artful examples of this.

Herb
----

On Aug 28, 2004, at 6:22 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:

> Mark Mandel writes:
>> Usually it takes me considerably less than a second to recognize a
>> Nigerian
>> scam spam letter and delete it, assuming I have not already deleted
>> it from
>> the subject line index. But a word in the first paragraph of this one
>> caught
>> my attention and I thought it was worth sharing with the rest of you
>> word
>> freaks.
>
> Well, epigrammatic in that the illness was brief (if not downright
> pithy)?

>> ... He died after an epigrammatic illness that lasted for
>> only four days...

as so often happens, a malaprop has induced the tip-of-the-tongue state
in me.  help!  what was the writer aiming at with "epigrammatic"?
"epidemic"?  "dramatic"?  what?

arnold



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