some kind of malaprop

[Baker, John]

        Isn't there a third possibility, that it isn't a malapropism at
all, but an intended and clever word choice?


John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Arnold M. Zwicky
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2007 9:50 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: some kind of malaprop

from elizabeth daingerfield zwicky, a pointer to

   http://scribbit.blogspot.com/2007/08/who-says-i-have-no-sense-of-
humor.html

which contains the line

> Of course they asked me this while I was simultaneously rolling out a
> pizza crust, emptying the dishwasher, bathing a child and talking on
> the phone to a stupid telemarketer who only understood the word "no"
> when accompanied by explicatives.

as so often with such things, you can't tell whether this was an
inadvertent error (a fay/cutler malapropism) or the writer's intended
word choice (a classical malapropism).

arnold

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